The Christian ministry, its present claim and attraction : and other writings

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THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY

SItja? ^tt^mt Claim anti 3Cttraction

AND OTHER WRITINGS

THEODOEE C. PEASE

BABTLET FBOFESSOB OP SACBED BHETOBIC IN AHDOVBB THEOLOGICAL BEMINABT

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
PROFESSOR EGBERT C. SMYTH, D. D.

EDITED BY

"THE FORTNIGHTLY CLUB"

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

1894

Copyright, 1894,
Bv HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Printed by H. 0. Houghton and Company.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

INTKODUCTION.

By Professor Egbert C. Smyth, D. D. . . v
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH rii

INAUGUEAL ADDRESS.

The Christian Ministry : Its Present Claim and

Attraction ....... 1

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.
I. Primitive and Fundamental Elements in Preaching 46
II. Relation of Homiletics to Logic, Rhetoric, and

Eloquence ....... 79

SERMONS.

I. "Called to be Saints" 110

II. The Enigma of Life 125

ESSAY ON DANTE.

Dante's Vision of Sin and Judgment : A Study of

the Inferno 141

POEMS AND HYMNS.

Era Angelico 173

Sunrise on Mount Moosilauke . . . .174
Memories from Over Sea .... 175-181

"Peace, be Still" 182

"Feed My Lambs" 182

The Return from the Mountain .... 184
For the Communion Season .... 186
The Last Easter 189

IN MEMORIAM.

Shies were not yet red with sunset, far off still the evening hell,
Only sights and sounds of midday eye and ear could seem to tell.
And we knew not that our greeting was the greeting of farewell,

Did not Tcnow, in our rejoicing, that the hour had waxed so late.
That the tides were sobbing seaward which can neither turn nor wait,
And already in our presence stood the Opener of the Gate.

Thin the veil that hides the future we have never seen nor can ;
But that future somehow mingles strangely in the life of man.
While we see in part, and only see in part, the Father' s plan.

Every life hath its completeness — Are there not twelve hours still
In the day ? — And whosoever makes his own the Master's will,
Living, dying, staying, going, doth the circle all fulfill.

Friend of ours, we did not tell thee all we might have told that day ;
Many another thing we cherished in our heart of hearts to say,
Sad we known it was expedient thou so soon shouldst go away.

We were looking for achievement, and the victory had been won ;
For the golden years of service — with the sands so nearly run ;
Yea, we thought it the beginning, when God said thy work was done.

We shall not forget thee — never, while the way before us towers;
Something from thy life inpassing touched the inner springs in ours ;
Thou henceforth art in alliance there with God's uplifting powers.

Thou art here ; lo, thou art yonder, where the heavenly seasons roll,
Where in light and life immortal ends the pathway, of the soul, —
One hand beckoning, and the other resting on the shining goal.

S. V. COLE.

" The FortnigUly," November 27, 1893.

INTEODUCTION.

This little volume deserves attention apart from
its memorial character. Its level and range of
thought, and its literary quality, are of a high
order. Those especially who would cultivate the
power of apt and effective public speaking will
find in it much that is helpful.

It is capable of a yet higher service, and for a
wider circle. Whatever presents to "the mind a
true ideal, and quickens the energies necessary to
its pursuit, has a universal value and is fitted to
gain permanent influence. This ideal may spe-
cially concern a particular profession, yet its eleva-
tion and nobleness belong to all pure and lofty
aims and bring them to view, and the strenuous
purpose revealed in its pursuit in any direction of
effort is identical or accordant with the resolution
demanded for the cultivation of excellence in all
other spheres in which it may be attained. It is
in this way that the following pages, even those
most exclusively occupied with the objects and
methods of a single calling, will attract and influ-
ence, it is hoped, men of other vocations, and, in-

VI INIRODUCTION.

deed, so far as they become known, every generous
and aspiring mind. This their wider adaptation
and import will doubtless appear at once to any
one who will carefully peruse them. Yet a brief
reference to some facts personal to the author of
the lectures, sermons, and other productions here
gathered together may not be superfluous.

Professor Pease was endowed with unusual gifts
for linguistic and literary pursuits. The Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Italian
languages were easily at his command, and he was
unusually conversant with the best in their litera-
tures. He had a strong natural predilection for
aesthetic studies. The call came to him to take up
the work of a preacher of the gospel and of a
pastor. Fearing lest his love of helles lettres, if he
wrote his sermons, would hazard or mar their es-
sential quality as addresses, converting them more
or less into essays, he early determined to speak
to men directly and under the influence of their
immediate presence. Perfecting in every way his
conception of the possible power and highest ob-
jects of such address, he gave himself with remark-
able assiduity and strength of resolution to the
realization of his ideal. He was first and most of
all a diligent student of the Word of God, reading
it in the original languages with critical care, catch-
ing with ear attent the very " accent of the Holy

INTRODUCTION. vu

Ghost." The cure of souls was to him an impor-
tant part of his ministry, and intimately connected
with the material and aim qf his preaching. He
endeavored to enter into the meaning and progress
of the lives, into the intimate needs, of his people
in his successive charges. He spoke from life to
life. The subjects of his sermons were thoughtfully
selected ; their materials carefully collected and ar-
ranged ; orderliness and lucidity reigned supreme.
Their diction was a triumph of an art which was
wholly concealed, and was gained by a severe dis-
cipline and the use of a definite and intelligent
method. As I have intimated, the forms of speech
which Mr. Pease used in preaching were not fixed
in advance by reducing them to writing. Neither
were they in general committed to memory. Free
room and play were left for the inspirations which
come to a prepared speaker when fully enlisted and
engaged in actual discourse. Apart from the special
and immediate preparation of the matter of his dis-
course, his method was to perfect himself in the
English tongue so that in the delivery of his ser-
mon, in the expression of his thought when face to
face with an audience, he would be in command of
this language as a musician is master of the Instru-
ment on which he plays. His vocabulary became
at once copious and select by a veritable conquest
of words, acquiring them by wresting from them

viii INTRODUCTION.

the secret of their individual weight and force, and
by familiarity with them in their choicest uses;
training his ear also - to their energy or delicacy,
and fixing them in memory, by often repeating
them aloud. One way in which he enlarged the
range of his vocabulary, and at the same time made
it more select and serviceable, was the daily, or at
least regular and persevering, oral translation into
English from foreign authors whose diction was
most marked by the note of distinction. This
practice aided memory by associating the sound of
the word with its characters, and also rendered
more flexible the organs of speech. The result in
his own preaching was marked. With but few
notes, he spoke with an easy command of language
which was so natural and perfect as to be almost
unnoticed save by those who reflected upon what
was occurring. The words were but the thought,
the theme, the motive which stirred to action. They
were a lucid atmosphere, the medium of vision. If
their force or beauty arrested attention, it was as the
form which the spiritual reality they embodied most
naturally assumed. Mere fluency may diminish
expression, and is not a rare nor difficult attain-
ment. The choice of the right word, the unfettered
use of language appropriate to thoughts that range
from earth to heaven, the spontaneous selection of
forms and sounds that vary to the changing note

INTR OD UCTION. vs.

and onward movement of persuasive discourse ; o£
words that with the Spirit's power bring conviction
of sin, righteousness, and judgment, that strengthen
for conflict and minister consolation, that point out
plainly the path the Saviour trod, and move men
to follow Him, is quite another art and far more
difficult to gain.

Yet it is not a particular method, or its success,
to which I desire most to call attention, or which
lends to this volume, as already noticed, its distinc-
tive worth. It stands for life in its highest mood
and consecration. What has any one better to do,
or for which stimulus and help are of more value
to him, than to strive after the best ?

I scarcely have known a more pathetic termi-
nation of a public career than the close of Mr.
Pease's life. He had been called to the chair of
Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology in Andover
Seminary with a delightful unanimity. His accept-
ance of the office had been deliberate and conscien-
tious, and marked by a conviction that his life had
led him up to this special work. He entered on di-
rect preparation for it with an enthusiasm, modest,
quiet, controlled, yet clear and strong, and from
unfailing fountains. Many gathered to listen to
his inaugural, to welcome him to the work he was
undertaking. How bright were the growing and
fruitful years that seemed to lie before him. He

X INTRODUCTION.

mapped out his course of lectures, was about to
enter on their delivery, and his voice was stilled.

To our Christian faith there are no uncom-
pleted lives for those who are one with the Con-
queror of the grave. Yet, besides this deepest of
consolations, is the solace, that here, within our
earthly horizons, and in so brief a time, there had
been so genuine and noble an achievement. He
who had thus wrought and succeeded had seen the
heavenly vision, which in its own divine way
comes to all, and had been obedient to it. Choos-
ing a special form of service, he had made perfec-
tion in it his aim. All his life was smitten by
the love of the ideal. And there was in this life
something yet more important to be noticed, for it
is more rare and stimulating; the resolve, the
unalterable decision, to attain to what he saw, a
power and majesty ever commanding him and
beckoning him on. The inaugural address, and
the opening lectures he was to have delivered, have
from this point of view an imperishable charm.
They mean what one man saw as a worthy aim,
and what he had been willing to do for it, and this
not as a transient impulse or purpose, but as a daily
consecration and unintermitting and strenuous en-
deavor. The few other productions which accom-
pany those just referred to also serve, each in its
own way, to illustrate the same significance of his

INTRODUCTION. xi

life. The clergymen, whose affectionate remem-
brance of their brother and desire to widen his
influence, and the parishioners who have assisted
them in executing this purpose, in offering this
volume to the public, know full well how little it
suggests of his ministerial work, and how inade-
quately it represents his preaching. A life which
had sacrificed literary aims in obedience to a call
for direct and active service in the Christian min-
istry, had cut itself off from the early preparation
of works for publication.

I knew and loved Mr. Pease as a pupil. His
scholarship was accurate, his fidelity constant, his
simplicity and sincerity of character marked and
attractive. With peculiar pleasure he was wel-
comed to his chair of instruction. If he had lived
to enter fully on its duties he would have been, be-
yond question, a fit and distinguished teacher of
preachers.

This volume, brief as it is, contains and reveals
the secret of all true power. It testifies to a life
which aimed, in deep sincerity, in humility, in full-
ness of consecration, with a constant and victori-
ous resoluteness, to achieve what is ideally best
and of all things the most real. We are impressed
anew with the power of such an ideal when taken
up into a human will.

E. C. S.
Andover Theological Seminaby, May 8, 1894.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Theodoke Claudius Pease was born in the
city of Poughkeepsie, New York, on the 14th of
October, 1853. The few available facts as to his
lineage and early years are thus given in his own
words in the records of his class at Harvard : —

"The origin of the name Pease is uncertain.
But as a coat of arms granted to the family by
Otho II. of Germany has a pea haulm in an eagle's
beak, the name is probably connected in some way
with the pea plant. Whether the family came first
from Germany or Italy is a disputed point. The
first individual of the name of whom we have any
record was John Pease, LL. D., who lived in Eng-
land A. D. 1472. One branch of the family traces
its descent to Robert Pease, who came from Ips-
wich, England, the last of April, 1634, and settled
in Salem. His second son, John, removed from
Salem to Fresh Water Brook, which was then a
part of Springfield, Massachusetts, but is now
Thompsonville, Connecticut. His second son, Rob-
ert, removed to the adjoining town of Enfield in
1681, and is said to have been one of the first con-

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xiii

stables of that town. His second son, Robert,
lived for a time in Andover, Massachusetts, but
afterwards settled in that part of Enfield, Connect-
icut, now called Somers. His fourth son was born
in Somers, June 28, 1739, and lived in his native
town as a farmer. He was a lieutenant in the
Revolution. His eldest son, Giles, was born in
Somers, April 13, 1763. He was a merchant, and
held the office of justice of the peace.

" His eldest son, born at Somers, January 30,
1789, was named Theodore. He settled in Hartford
as a merchant, but died at the age of thirty, July
26, 1819. His second son, my father, Claudius Bu-
chanan, was born in Somers, April 22, 1815. He
was a merchant for ten years in Georgia, and six
years in New Orleans, La. Then he engaged in
the lumber business in New York city, living in
Poughkeepsie, and afterwards was a paper manu-
facturer in Springfield, Mass.

"My mother, whose name before her marriage was
Elvira Ann Smith, was the daughter of Jonathan
and Elvira Parsons Smith." She was a woman of
noble character and of rare refinement and culture,
and her son inherited from her, as he believed, his
love for literature and his facility in language.
She died at Poughkeepsie, April 30, 1855, at the
age of thirty-four years, six months and six days.

" I was then, when two years and a half old.

XIV BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

taken to Somers, where I lived with my father's
mother and sister. When I was twelve and a half
years old this sister of my father's, my aunt Sarah,
died, and my father came to Somers, where he re-
mained till I was sixteen, at which time we removed
to Springfield. I fitted for college partly with Pro-
fessor Kipley, who established a home school in
Somers, and mostly at the Springfield High School,
under Mr. O. M. Fernald, since professor of Greek
in Williams College, then classical instructor in
this school, to whom its graduates owed largely the
excellent preparation for coUege which they re-
ceived."

This record shows the growth, on the stock of a
typical New England family rooted in the soil of
an ordinary New England village, of the beautiful
character and talent which this book commem-
orates. It has a further value as portraiture, for it
bears witness thus early to the writer's love of de-
tail, eagerness for all the facts that might cast
light on the subject in hand, and careful habit of
research and statement which led him to set down
with accuracy, and with even greater fullness than
our abridgment shows, all available particulars in
a record to be closed unread, and sealed in the
vaults of a safe deposit.

This trait is observed in the earliest recollections
we have of his childhood. Aji occasional inmate

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xv

of the home remembers him " at an age when he
was not too old to sit on her knee, and yet old
enough to love books and reading, and to talk of
them as he sat there." Into his studies he entered
with such zest that at school he had no rivals.
But his chief delight was in " a precious old an-
thology of prose and verse, which he searched for
treasures to read, talk of, repeat, or make the
model of his own expression. He was a happy
child, the light and sunshine of the home, loving
and lovable, full of breezy life and fun." Like all
boys in country homes, he had his share of the
tasks and "chores" about the place. These he
seems to have disliked, in the degree that they were
solitary ; but whether to his taste or not, " he al-
ways did them obediently, and with the same thor-
oughness that marked aU his work through life.
There were no more weeds left in the garden bed
when he had finished than there were inaccuracies
in his New Testament work in after life. The
child was father of the man." The proverb ap-
plies with even greater force to his love and gift
of reading mentioned above. This grew with his
growth, and became a great talent, so that whoever
knew him at all knew of this. The swiftness, the
persistence, the range and variety of his reading,
which made all literature both in ancient and mod-
ern tongues his domain, the power to possess and

XVI BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

retain the substance, and if he pleased the verbal
form of what he read, and to estimate, digest, and
assimilate it, may fairly be compared with the like
gift of Macaulay, and, as in the case of Macaulay,
was the amazement of his friends, impressing most
those who knew him best. On the early beginnings
of this passion and practice we have his own testi-
mony. The only portion of the little autobio-
graphy from which we have quoted that leaves sim-
ple facts for anything like a personal " confession "
is the closing paragraph.

" My love for reading has always been greater
than for any kind of amusement. But a small
country town afforded little opportunity for its
gratification, and the taste was but poorly directed.
My present mother, formerly a principal of Mount
Holyoke Seminary, whose maiden name was Mary
W. Chapin, has assisted me largely ; and from our
removal to Springfield my eyes alone have set the
bounds to my unlimited enjoyment of books. I
well remember how much of school hours even I
spent in reading the songs in ' Chambers's Cyclo-
paedia of English Literature,' a copy of which was
kept in school for reference. In college the same
devotion to reading has continued, and the gratifi-
cation of this, and an equally boundless love of
writing, has proved the most delightful, if not the
most valuable, part of my college work. My plans

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xvii

for life are quite undeveloped as yet, but I trust
that opportunities to gratify these two tastes will
not be wanting."

The impression of his mental bent thus gained
is deepened by the witness of all who knew him in
college. His record of scholarship and social stand-
ing, as marked by rank, honors, and offices, is cred-
itable. He stood first of the second ten in his
class. In Freshman year he received one of the
Lee prizes for reading, and at the beginning of
the Sophomore year a " detur," — Walton's Lives.
He was a member of the society of Christian Bre-
thren, of the Everett Athenaeum, of the 11. H.
and the O. K., and the $. B. K. societies. From the
middle of his Sophomore to the middle of his Sen-
ior year, he was editor of the " Advocate." He was
Odist at the Sophomore Class Supper, and was
elected Class Poet at graduation. This latter part
was done with great distinction, and received
marked attention from Professor James Kussell
Lowell, who, during the last two years of his
course at least, favored him with his acquaintance
and society, and guided him in his reading, his
style, and especially his study and practice of the
forms of verse. It was in lines like these that he
was set apart from his classmates, and, at least in
poetical gift, from the men of his time in college.

His general fame at Harvard arose chiefly out

xviii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

of his work on the " Advocate," to which he con-
tributed an extraordinary number of articles, more
than sixty-five in all. Scarcely an issue appeared
without some verse above his initials. Many of
these were reprinted in periodicals of wider circu-
lation ; and in the volume of " Yerses from the
Harvard Advocate," which preserved in more per-
manent form the best poetry of the first twelve
years of its issue, only two competitors approached
him in the number of poems found worthy of in-
sertion, while his contributions exceed those of
both of them together. His literary and linguistic
aptitudes were thought phenomenal. " He ab-
sorbed a language, and tongues dead or living
were real vestibules whereby he entered into a
knowledge of the life and thought of ancient or
modern peoples." This judgment of a classmate
and lifelong friend, who has since won distinction
in the same profession, like all else that is said of
him in youth, casts a light forward over his whole
life, which, as the same writer says, "was a nat-
ural development of what he was in college." His
room, his hands, his pockets are remembered as
loaded with books. His head seemed full of their
contents, especially of poetry, which on occasion
would flow in streams from his lips. All this will
seem to those who knew him later as said of him
but yesterday. There were favorite authors, and

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xix

passages, or poems, to which he must introduce
every new friend. For how many has he been
a guide to Dante, or Plato, or Browning, or New-
man, or whatever author each man's specialty or
aptitude would respond to ? Yet neither then nor
later was there any touch of conceit, of pedantry
or patronage in this. He hated ostentation and dis-
play ; modesty and reserve were an unfailing ele-
ment in his charm. But he loved beauty, and he
loved his fellows, and whether his companion were
child or adult, man or woman, it was his nature to
share every treasure of his own which he felt would
be welcome. To this he was impelled in part by a
fine passion for expression, but even more by the
nobler delight in impartation.

As one said of him in later years, he had a gen-
ius for friendship and comradeship. This, we have
seen, was noted in his childhood. To many of his
classmates this seemed his most notable trait. His
work was done easily and naturally ; it seemed no
more to absorb him than breathing, and left him
undiminished spirits and leisure for companion-
ship. " His room was a social centre for a con-
genial set. His recreations and even his tasks he
preferred to do in company." " He was healthy,
cheerful, friendly, entertaining, full of wit and
merriment, and often in high states of mental and
emotional happiness." " Yet no degree of hilarity.

XX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

no provocation of his sense of humor, ever betrayed
him into a vulgar word." " He was high-minded,
pure, guileless, sensitive, poetic." " A lover of
beauty, moral and intellectual, he was never heard
to say anything to mar the sweet purity of his
ideal."

Two years before he entered college, in October,
1869, when fifteen years old, he joined the Con-
gregational church in Somers, Conn. From his
Freshman year he was a member of the Christian
Brethren, and "in class-meetings. Christian Bre-
thren meetings, and in personal intercourse, he ex-
hibited a high standard of Christian life." " He
was also among the first members of a little society
founded in his Freshman year, under the name of
'YTrrjpeTai XpuTTov, and which consisted of men from
different classes looking forward to the Christian
ministry."

The influences and inclinations leading him into
his life's calling reach further back, and lie deeper
than our scanty light enables us to follow. The
tone of uncertainty in the closing sentence of his
class record, and perhaps the interval of two years
which he let pass between Harvard and Andover,
given in part to teaching literature in Annapolis
Naval Academy, seem to show that his purpose
was not settled when he left college. For aspi-
rants to the ministry those were times of great

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxi

mental perplexity. There was a breach between
the church, its faith and ideal, and the world in
the light of modern learning and activity, which
the teaching and example of ministers like himself
have helped to remove. But though he took time
to know his mind and his duty, he always sought
the determining impulses to his calling as far back
as the confines of his earliest remembrance, and
felt his vocation to be coeval with his life. " I
have long known," he said when he received his
license to preach, " that I could never be anything
else than a Christian minister."

He received his special training for the minis-
try in Andover Theological Seminary, where after
three years of study he was graduated in 1880.
In August of the same year he was married to
Abby Frances Cutter, who, with her oldest and
only surviving child, Arthur Stanley Pease, is now
living in Andover, Massachusetts.

In June of his Senior year in the Seminary he
received and accepted a call to the Congregational
Church in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, a town
lying on the Connecticut River opposite to White
River Junction, and four miles south of Dart-
mouth College, in a region beautifully mingling
the charms of hill and river scenery. The parish
includes a quiet, thrifty, little village with outlying
farms. A young ladies' seminary in the place

xxu BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

then made part of the congregation. The church
numbered something under two hundred members.
Here he was ordained in September, 1880, and
here he passed four busy, useful, fruitful, happy,
and above all growing years.

On his part he became fond of the place and
people, and never ceased to love them, and look
back with satisfaction and pleasure on his life
among them. On their side, " his life and his
words made a deep and lasting impression for good
on the community. As a man and a citizen he
was highly honored and esteemed. Courtesy and
cheerfulness were habitual in his bearing. The
laborer and the college professor alike were charmed
by his honest simplicity and profound erudition.
As a scholar he won a steadily widening fame.
His culture and learning were all the time a ben-
efit to the community and the Seminary, and were
recognized at the college. As a pastor he was
beloved by his flock. Earnestness, spirituality, and
sympathy were his marked characteristics. As a
preacher he was without a peer in this region of
the State. He was an eloquent and ready speaker,
and drew many to his congregation."

This pastorate stands out in his life as an epoch
of growth. He made rapid progress in the studies
and art of his calling. He settled his habits and
lines of reading and research ; he formed definite

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxiii

ideals of the functions of pastor and preacher;
he discovered his gift, and perfected his style of
extempore delivery. In the mastery of his profes-
sion, and the expansion and enrichment of his
mental and even more his spiritual nature, he made
an advance which did not fail to be remarked by
those who watched him during these four years,
and which overtook with surprise friends who had
not seen him during the interval.

There is a curiously interesting account of his
appearance as a man and a preacher at this time,
which is good even for later years. A chance trav-
eller, who had been caught over Sunday in the
vicinity, found such unexpected compensation in
the sermon he heard in the little church at West
Lebanon that he was moved to write of it to the
" Boston Journal " in a letter which appeared in
the issue of February 3, 1884. He describes the
preacher as " a young man, neither tall nor slight,
with a broad face and scholarly brow; posture
erect, except when speaking he lifts the head back
and to one side a little ; the sermon, extempore, — a
minute study of words, a search for the essentials
of the thing, careful analysis and discussion, a prac-
tical application to every-day life. Unity, progress,
force, and point in the discourse. Words care-
fully not laboriously chosen, elocution pleasant,
not lofty or ornate, but familiar and yet impressive.

XXIV BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

suggesting conscientious sincerity and consecration.
A thoughtful, powerful, practical sermon, grace-
fully and feelingly delivered, — an inspiration to a
better life."

This singular communication to a daily paper, and
evidently unbiased tribute of a passing stranger,
precipitated an inevitable crisis in the career of
the preacher thus signalized. It naturally arrested
the attention of churches seeking a minister, and
led to his being heard, and in the end called by the
First Congregational Church in Maiden, Mass.

This church is one of the three or four oldest in
New England, having its beginnings as far back as
1648. The traditions of its long and honored line
of pastors set an exacting ideal. It was the only
church of its faith and order in the heart of the
town, which grew rapidly, doubling its population
in the nine years of this pastorate, during which
the church added as many new names to its roU as
it had resident members when Mr. Pease came to
it. It served its large and outspread constituency
not only in the various services of the central meet-
ing house, but through several branches, some of
which were started under him, and one developed
into an independent church.

To supply the needs of this busy, growing church,
this broad parish, these hundreds of families, the
new pastor labored, fulfilling every function with

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxv

unwearied faithfulness. This pastorate, no less
than the former one, was a period of growth, en-
largement, ripening. But it bears the special mark
of work and service.

He maintained his habits of study and culture,
still following lines, some of which had engaged
him in youth. Each day saw its canto of Dante
read in the original, until, ere he closed it for the
last time, he had been through the " Commedia "
nearly seventy times. His critical, textual study
of the Hebrew and Greek, and rapid reading of
the English version of the Bible kept on, with
growing concentration of interest. More or less
directly everything became tributary to this, and
to his study of the theory and art of preaching, to
which more and more definitely he gave himself, as
if drawn intuitively and by the compulsion of a
divine call to the work which in the end was to
claim him, and to which he was fitted and dedi-
cated.

Yet all this was secondary and incidental to his
service of his people. He was a busy, working,
careful pastor, giving the best and most of his time
and strength, and heart as well, to the burden of
service, responsibility, sympathy, instruction, min-
istry ; various, incessant, accumulating, no atom of
which he would shirk, which he loved to bear. He
never suffered a personal interest to interfere, never

XXVI BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

spared himself, if any light, comfort, or power from
the gospel could come through him to any single
soul. Only his rare facility, versatility, and healthy
vitality of mind and body enabled him to bear this
steady and increasing strain without disaster. Too
ready, we cannot but fear, he was to spend and be
spent, too willing to make one of those slow, silent,
often unnoticed offerings, of ministers who joy and
rejoice to be poured out upon the sacrifice and ser-
vice of the faith of their churches.

There is an eloquent monument of this patient,
fruitful service in the pastor's record, which shows
the number, variety, and scope of his instructions
as teacher and preacher ; and contains the roll of
the large number whom by his voice and hand he
welcomed into the church of Christ, every name
written in that always beautiful handwriting, which
here embodies each syllable and letter with a lov-
ing care, and nicety, that seems almost to speak of
the minute knowledge and personal regard which
each shared; fit symbol of that inward register
which preserved indelibly the names, faces, per-
sonality, and heart's secrets of joy or sorrow, of all
these and many more. He knew, not by effort, but
because of his individual interest the register of
his church literally by heart.

There is no end to the testimonies of those who
only learn the more as the lapse of time parts them

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxvii

from him, how much they are indebted to him
for the blessing of sorrows comforted, or of faith
found, recovered, or deepened and enlarged. " To
those in trouble of any kind he was tenderly sym-
pathetic and thoughtful, and was always more than
glad to have inquiring, even doubting ones come to
him for advice and assistance, and with such he
had a happy faculty of clearing away the doubts,
not so much by opposing arguments as by quietly
and tactfully leading the thought to truths to
which they could consent. In this way many a
young man just on the verge of slipping away into
the darkness of doubt or skepticism itself, or into
indifference, was saved to a life of useful, earnest
service of God."

In a wider way, " by his simple personal charac-
ter, and the unconscious lifting of others by a pure,
gracious, unselfish life, he was a constant inspira-
tion in the community. Charming in conversation,
a good listener as well as talker, quick in catching
the humorous side of conversation, full of fun as
well as scholarly and instructive, wholly above re-
proach in motive and in act, he won all hearts to
him by his tender, loving charity, and his quick
appreciation of the best to be found in all he met."

After all, his pulpit was the focus to which all
his labors converged, from which his influence
radiated. "Always earnest and impressive, he

xxviii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

was at times most eloquent, expressing largest,
deepest truths in choicest language. He never
failed to be instructive and inspiring, so honest
and true to his own ideals ; so spiritual and with
such a sweet loving spirit, absolutely sinking all
thought of self in his treatment of any sacred
theme. His first aim — his constant aim in all his
public efforts — was to be real in all he said from
the pulpit, and so he was never betrayed into say-
ing anything under the excitement of the occasion,
or for the sake of effect, or which had not pre-
viously become a very part of his own honest
thought and belief. This won him the lasting re-
spect and esteem of his people, and gave all that
he said great weight and power. The growth in
Christian life under his preaching was, as he would
have had it, largely unconscious of its source, even
with those most affected by it. Yet it was none
the less real, steady, and abiding. Many were
gradually led to a larger conception of Christian
truth and life, and more close, living, personal re-
lations to Christ himself, through his ministry, who
could not perhaps recall the particular sermons
from which influences for good had come to them."
The prime defect of this memorial, bitterly re-
gretted by its editors, as it wiU be by former hearers
of Mr. Pease, is that it contains not even one fair
example of what more than all else together was

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxix

the work and. achievement of his life, — his sermons.
They live in delightful memories, better still in the
substance of the character and faith of many listen-
ers, but to eye and ear they are lost beyond recall.
The two herein printed are but waifs, broken and
battered, that have drifted by chance currents to
hand. They are reconstructed from incomplete
shorthand notes, and the second of them lacks even
the benefit of the author's revision. The poems
too, it must be remembered, were as a rule not
prepared by the writer for publication. The Essay
on Dante needs, indeed, no apology. It should not,
however, be understood to represent the author's
powers of thought or expression at their best, for,
though it bears a recent date, it was the slow de-
velopment and late revision of a theme the lines
of which were fixed by an effort of his immature
powers.

This volume as a whole is a memorial of the
mind and art of one who was resolutely withhold-
ing himself from work for publication until the
full time of harvest should come. He had no
sooner put in the sickle than it dropped from his
hand. The small handful of precious first-fruits,
in the opening address and lectures, best tell us
what the harvest would have been.

In May, 1893, he received, and in June accepted,
a call to become Bartlet Professor of Sacred Khe-

XXX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

toric and Lecturer on Pastoral Theology In An-
dover Theological Seminary. He formally closed
his pastorate in Maiden, with a farewell sermon,
September 3. He had already moved to Andover,
and begun, without any interval of rest, the prep-
aration of his Inaugural Address. This was de-
livered September 20, in the presence of an as-
sembly, which filled to its utmost capacity the
Seminary chapel, and was made significant by the
presence of representatives from near and far of
his brethren in the ministry, with whose general
approval and acclaim he had been called to his
chair. This done, he turned at once with ardor
and growing zest to the duties of his professorship,
giving his time mostly to the preparation of his
course in Homiletics, of which he had drawn out
a complete scheme, and fully prepared five intro-
ductory lectures. As he speedily came to the deci-
sion to adopt the same free method in their deliv-
ery that he used in preaching, he wrote out only
the first two, and hence these alone, though not
surpassing the rest in interest and value, are avail-
able for publication.

Over these closing weeks, full of enthusiasm and
activity, slowly crept the deepening shadow of a
strange physical lassitude, which his friends ac-
counted for by the loss of his wonted summer's
rest, and the excessive mental and emotional sti'ains

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxxi

lie had been under; but its insidious cause duly
appeared in a fever, which proved to be typhoid,
and after three weary weeks, happily free from
severe pain, terminated his life.

His mind was quite clear at the last, and he
knew well that he was near his "passing." He
looked back with humble, earnest gratitude, be-
cause "he had been permitted for thirteen years
to be a minister of the Lord Jesus ; " onward, with
confident hope that he should soon meet this same
dear Lord, and friends gone before, among them
his own mother, of whom he had no memory, only
all his life a longing for, and the one who had so
truly taken a mother's place to him, and of whom
we have seen dutiful mention in his class record.
To friends he was leaving on earth, he sent his
love, mentioning them singly and in groups, and in
particular to " every member of the church in
West Lebanon, and of the church in Maiden."
To all, in whatever degree of nearness they stood
to him, to wife, to son, to father, and sisters, to his
students, fellow-professors, fellow-ministers, to the
churches he had served, he left in some form the
same message : " Tell them, when one comes here,
where I am there seems only one thing worth liv
ing f or, — to love and to serve the Lord Jesus."
With such words were filled the last hours of a
beautiful Lord's day afternoon, and towards the

xxxii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

dawn of the next morning, November 20, 1893, he
was given the answer of his prayer, audibly ut-
tered, " Let me go, for the day breaketh."

To friends in a wider circle, all unforewarned,
the news of this sudden departure brought a pain-
ful revulsion of their feelings of pleasure in his
promotion, joy in his first triumph, and boundless
hopes of his career, and left them bewildered by
the startling and mysterious stroke. One group of
these, which had gradually clustered about the per-
sonality of Mr. Pease, with whom he had been, the
guest and hero of their gathering, only the day
before his prostration by illness, when they met
after his death found a voice for their emotions in
the few verses read by one of their number. They
stand at the front of this volume, in some measure,
perchance, to speak the thoughts of many hearts.

It was wonderful how soon the gloom above the
enigma of this heavy grief and loss broke and
lifted before the shining of a holy life, and the
light of the truths in which it had been lived, of
which it still spoke. The Seminary chapel, where
he had so lately given his inaugural, was filled
with the sound of hymns of cheer and hope that
he loved, and a simple ritual of Scripture and
prayer. About him were gathered, as before, a
great assembly, returning to share the joy of a
loftier triumph with one who had again been called

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH xxxiii

to " come up higher," and " wear a truer crown
than any wreath that man can weave him."

Only a few steps back of this chapel and the line
of Seminary buildings lies the burial ground which
has received to its bosom already a worthy succes-
sion of godly and scholarly men. It is merely a
small and plain square of land, untouched by any
futile efforts of man's art to adorn it, but beauti-
fied alone by encircling hills and woods, by the
glories of a noble prospect, and by the consecra-
tion of much precious dust. It was our friend's
wish that he might finish his work on this hill, and
here on its slope might lie when it was done. Here
his four little children, who had lived but a few
weeks in the home in Maiden, were brought to lie
at his feet. Hither the students of his class, who
had begun already to love him as a friend, and
were counting on him as their master, bore his
body, and here in such sweet and honorable com-
panionship we laid him down, while his own life,
and his last message to us each, seemed to blend
in our hearts with the prayer we heard over the
grave.

..." We bless and praise Thy holy name for
all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and
fear, and especially for those most dear to us, of
whom we have good hope that they have fallen
asleep in Jesus. And we beseech Thee to give us

xxxiv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

grace to follow their good examples, that even here
we may be united to them in fellowship of spirit,
and that finally we may be gathered together with
them into the bosom of Thy love : through Jesus
Christ our Lord."

C. L. N.

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

ITS PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION,
AND OTHER WRITINGS.

THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:
ITS PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION.^

It is quietly assumed in many quarters that the
special charm of the Christian ministry is broken ;
that the distinctive attraction of this field of labor
is in large measure irretrievably lost. Robbed of
the position and prestige it once held in the intel-
lectual no less than in the moral and spiritual
sphere, the ministry, it is said, can no longer urge
the claims or present the opportunities of other
days, — not merely of the ages past, but even of
forty or fifty years ago. In the changes that have
passed over modern life, older rivals have gained
a precedence before denied, and new rivals have
arisen to dispute the prize. To these changes, it
is added, the ministry must resign itself, with such
grace as it may, begin to take a lower room, and,
as a consequence, be content with the service of
inferior men. In a word, though the ministry will
doubtless long survive, — for our generation has
learned that nothing dies at once, — it will survive
in a state of mild decadence, a lingering autumn
which delays but cannot turn aside the killing

1 An Inaugural Address delivered at Andover Theological
Seminary, 20 September, 1893.

2 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

frost; while the higher, spiritual uses it once
served will be gradually taken up and absorbed by
other callings, which in turn will draw away the
energies of active, earnest, and thoughtful minds.

All this, it is true, is seldom put in words : it
is assumed, far oftener than asserted. Hence, to
many of my hearers, so plain and blunt a state-
ment as this may seem improbable and overdrawn.
And, in the close and sheltered circles in which
some minds still move, even the suggestion here
clothed in words may sound unnatural, almost
blasphemous, indeed. Yet it needs but little ac-
quaintance with the world of to-day, whether we
touch in person its busy, widening life, or catch
its manifold reflection as mirrored in literature, to
discover how common this quiet assumption has
grown to be. It meets us in the novel, the ro-
mance, the lighter essay. It colors the graver dis-
cussion of scientific, ethical, and social problems.
It gives a tone, a hue, an air, to magazines and
reviews ; the daily prints are tinctured with it. It
lurks below the language of men of science, of
business, of society, of the world: it affects their
bearing toward the minister with easy tolerance
or light disdain : it shades and shapes their advice
to young men who pause before they choose their
calling.

Sometimes, however, this assumption comes to

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 3

the surface, and finds direct expression, — is laid
down, indeed, as a maxim beyond dispute. Ten
years ago, an Englisli scholar, himself a preacher,
published an essay on "The Decay of Modern
Preaching," ^ in which the fact of such decay was
plainly accepted, remedies were hardly suggested,
and the causes alone were considered a subject for
discussion. "Within the last few weeks, however,
the assertion has been made in still clearer terms
by a newspaper of exceptional intelligence and
independence. With an air of easy omniscience
tempered by condescension, the editor writes as
follows: "This socialistic preaching is to be de-
plored, because it weakens the already relaxed hold
of the clergy upon educated men. The church, of
course, no longer attracts the ablest of our college
graduates as of old, but it is quite possible for
men of moderate intellectual gifts to influence
their hearers, if they will follow the methods and
precepts of their Leader." And again, in the
same article: "The proportion of educated men
who refuse altogether to listen to sermons is con-
siderable, and the average attendance of such men
at church seems to be diminishing. Many stiU
attend the established services from motives of de-
corum : but if their pastors could look through the
grave and respectful expressions that mask their
1 J. H. Maha%, The Decay of Modern Preaching. 1882.

4 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

thoughts, and see the emotions of pity for intel-
lectual feebleness and contempt for ignorance
which are held in restraint, they might learn that
their only strength lies in the possession and the
proclamation of humility and charity." ^ Humility
and charity are an edifying lesson indeed, and a
lesson it is always timely to learn, whether the
example of the teacher confirms his precept or not.
But the chief burden of this concio ad clerum is
precisely this assumption before us. Within the
narrowed province which bounds its present influ-
ence, the writer more than hints, the ministry can
no longer claim the service of minds of the first
order, but must expect to see them drawn into
wider and more promising fields, thus leaving at
best only second-rate men to become the preachers
and pastors of to-morrow.

Now, minds of the first order are not common
in any age or in any calling in life, and it is
by " men of moderate intellectual gifts " that the
world's work is mainly done. I have no desire,
however, to discuss the personnel of the difEer-
ent professions, and comparisons are proverbially
odious. Still less have I any fear with regard to
the permanent place and work of the Christian
ministry, established as it is on the same divine

1 The Nation, May 25, 1893. Editorial on "Christian
Socialism."

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 5

foundations with the Christian church, and with
Christianity itself. But it seems to me not unfit-
ting, on the threshold 6f the new work to which
I have been called, and in contrast to the quiet
assumption already noticed, to dwell upon the dis-
tinctive claims and attractions of the ministry to-
day. New emphasis certainly should be laid, not
indeed upon what remains of earlier interest and
influence after all deductions have been made, but
rather upon the special claim and charm which
grow out of the present, which have accrued to
preacher and pastor alike from the very changes
through which we have passed. For when once
the needs, the demands, and the difficulties of our
age are fairly understood, the Christian ministry,
I am convinced, offers a richer opportunity and
makes a stronger appeal than ever before to the
largest and best disciplined intelligence, no less
than to the heart that seeks the highest service of
mankind.

With the duties of the pastorate fresh in
memory, and more familiar than the duties of this
chair, I shall speak now as a preacher, not as a
teacher. But those who are preparing to become
ministers of the Word, beside the special know-
ledge and training amply provided here, need also
the inspiration that comes from a broad view of
their great charge, if the man of God is to be com-

6 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

plete, furnished completely unto every good work.
And if the duties and demands of their calling
enlarge upon the view, let them remember that
the charm of the vision widens with the horizon,
and the promise and presence of the Master are
broad and near to cover every need.

What, then, is the distinctive attraction, the
peculiar charm, of the ministry to-day? What
features does this calling now present which make
up for any apparent advantages it has lost, and by
which, even more than in other days, it appeals to
the highest powers, as it calls forth and rewards
the largest effort and devotion ? And how are this
claim and charm related to the charm and claim of
other departments of thought and interest ? These
questions will mark the direction to which our at-
tention must now be turned.

If there is one outstanding peculiarity in the in-
tellectual effort of to-day, one feature upon which
the finger may safely be put as distinctive, it is
this: an intense feeling for movement, progress,
growth, life. It is this which within one crowded
century has revolutionized the sciences of the past
and called new sciences into being. This is the
new spirit of which men speak. It is this pro-
found sense of the subtle, unbroken relations that
bind all forms of life together, individual and
social, past, present, and future, which has made

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 7

men Impatient of all partial, narrow, isolated in-
terpretations of facts and phenomena, and distrust-
ful of all theories that claim completeness, where
ignorance is veiled under specious assumptions of
omniscience. Method, no less than matter, has
been transformed by this spirit. The ambitious
systems of the past, with the dogmatism of be-
liever and skeptic alike, of Eousseau and Voltaire
no less than of Aquinas and Calvin, have given
place to more modest hypotheses, held below the
fact, not above it, with conscious and confessed
limitations of ignorance and partial view, ready to
be revised or superseded whenever some larger
truth or some plainer fact shall come to light.
This sense, this method, and this spirit we find
at work everywhere. Although most apparent at
first among the interpreters of life in nature and
life in man, even the sciences of inert matter and
mechanical movement have shared their influence.
Under this impulse, indeed, matter is no longer
inert, and movement no more mechanical. As-
tronomy, geology, and physics have felt the change.
" Within the last quarter of a century," writes
Camille Flammarion, " bur sublime science has
been whoUy transformed. Instead of watching
inert masses in motion through the void of space,
the study of the universe as related to the physical
constitution of the different worlds, the evolution

8 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

of the stars and of life, has taken its place." ^
Forces once supposed to be latent or lost, geology
discovers still at work, and allows no break to
separate the present from the past. It is hardly-
necessary to dwell on the new conception of or-
ganic life from its humblest origin to its highest
reach. Evolution is the keynote to all our thought ;
and, however the word may be limited or defined,
three great truths are firmly established : first, a
close, continuous, mutual relation exists between
all forms and parts of the visible universe ; second,
no unpeopled void is found between woi-m and
man, between star and soul ; and, third, as a con-
sequence, no object can be too remote, and no form
of life too lowly, to claim our interest. The years
of patient observation which Darwin gave to the
earth-worm and Sir John Lubbock to the ant teach
us that no creature that has shared the Creator's
thought and touch is unworthy of our prolonged
and reverent study. The higher the forms and the
more varied the phases life affords, the more in-
tense our human interest becomes. Man is not
forgotten in this all-embracing passion and re-
search. His individual life and thought, from the
lowest savage to the sage and saint, have been
traced with unwearied pains. His societies, his
civilizations, have been patiently studied in their
^ North American Review, January, 1890.

PEESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 9

crudest as well as their highest forms, in rock and
monument and in surviving fault and strata; at
cost of sacrifice worthy of the martyrs of the faith.
The inscriptions of Assyria, dumb for long cen-
turies, speak again to the ear and through the lips
of a Eawlinson, and the mummied monarchs of
Egypt leave their sepulchred pomp and silence to
become the familiars, almost the household friends,
of a Mariette. Thus history is clothed with life,
and the prehistoric past is made to breathe and
move once more. The same great change trans-
forms the world in which we live. The peoples of
the present, remote and hostile before, begin by
closer contact and better mutual understanding to
realize their kinship. The curse of Babel is re-
versed, and the miracle of Pentecost renewed,
when long isolated languages are brought together
and recognized as hardly more than dialects of a
common speech. Literature, refusing the narrow
bounds of the classic, becomes cosmopolite, and
welcomes all genuine treasure, whatever be its
source. A hundred myths and legends melt in
one, and under the most grotesque exterior we feel
through all religions the need, the aspiration, and
the soul of man.

How much the material progress of our age, its
marvelous inventions, its multiplied facilities, must
count as factors in this result, we cannot fail to

10 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

own. But it is the intellectual movement with
which we have to deal, and through all of this the
sense of life with its progress and continuity is
evident and distinctive.

It is not claimed, of course, that this sense of
life has been born out of nothing, or absolutely
created, in a single age. This spirit has always
been present in the world, disputing its place with
a coarser, mechanical conception. Within narrow
limits, and in separate realms of thought, it has
made the glory of every creative age, as in letters
at the Renaissance, or in religion at the Reforma-
tion. But in all these ages, barriers were inter-
posed, the spirit at work in one sphere did not
extend to another, inert matter and lifeless mech-
anism maintained their ground. To-day, for the
first time, the feeling is for life everywhere, for
life with its unbroken continuity and progress, for
life infinitely varied and manifold, yet forever
one. It is one universal, living force, which, we
have discovered in a truer sense than the poet
dreamed,

" Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees ;
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent." ^

What, then, is the relation of the Christian
1 Alexander Pope, Essay on Man.

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 11

ministry to this mighty and far-reaching change ?
How far has it been caught up and borne on by
this current of new life ? Has it felt a stronger
impulse, found a larger mission, brought a new
message for to-day ? On the answer to these ques-
tions our whole discussion turns. No isolation of
interest and influence is possible. If the ministry
enters into this universal movement, if it is sen-
sitive to this far-reaching change, it will share in
the results, and find in these a fresh attraction
for thoughtful minds. If the ministry stands un-
changed, while all else moves onward, its former
charm may well be broken, for it has lost the
prophetic spirit. Like the prophets of old, the
preacher must speak from life, through life, and
unto life, if his message is to be heard and heeded.
Considered in its ideal, no calling touches hu-
man life at so many points as the Christian min-
istry. None, therefore, should feel the change on
which we have dwelt so widely, none should profit
more by its results. And none should find the
present time a more inspiring field for service.
The spirit of the age both quickens the preacher's
pulse and appeals to him for his message. To
bear witness to the presence of an unseen life,
above, below, around our finite lives, has always
been his office, to make men feel that life has been
his triumph ; when this witness has grown cold.

12 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

formal, and mechanical, his state has suffered
decadence and eclipse. To-day, like St. Paul on
Mars' Hill, lie finds his teaching attuned to the
deepest thought of his age. Our poetry, in accents
now pensive, now profound, cries through the lips
of Egypt's king : —

" If thou be He that made the earth and skies,
To thine own creature come without disguise.
Long have I blindly groped around thy throne,
But the sense sees not what the heart has known.
I strain for thee, I gaze with eager nerves,
But my glance backward to my eyeballs curves ;
To meet thine arms my arms I fling abroad ;
My arms fold on me, vacant of the God.
Upon the dark I paint thy secret face,
But night holds nothing in her hollow space.
Dost thou not see my tears, not hear my cry ?
I cannot see nor hear, yet know thee nigh.
I feel thee in the dust-wreaths of the plain,
And in the rare, quick drops of sacred rain :
I seek thee round the corners of the rocks,
Or on the riverain pasture of the flocks ;
And thou art there, but art not there for me : —
Take all the world, all else I yield to thee :
But I must see the God before I die." ^

Our philosophy still worships an Unknown God,
but dares to think over his thoughts, and even di-
vine his attributes of intelligence and power. Our
science begins to look through pbenomena and
1 Francis Turner Palgrave, Amenophis.

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 13

ask for mind, and utters these significant words,
first spoken two years ago within these very walls
by a master of unquestioned authority : " In the
study of the successions exhibited by animals
and plants, it has been perceived that the march
of events from the primitive simplicity towards
greater and greater complication, culminating in
man, requires us to assume the existence of some-
thing like permanent guiding influences operating
in the world of matter." ^

In France, always sensitive as a barometer to
anticipate changes in the atmosphere of thought,
the need of "permanent guiding influences" in
the moral universe is also felt, and the direction
toward which men must look to find them is
plainly hinted. Saul also is found among the
prophets, when Renan foresees the possible return
of the world, wearied with the successive bank-
ruptcies of liberalism, to the Jehovah of the He-
brews. And Darmesteter, a savant of the younger
school, finds in the teaching of the prophets the
only hope for his own generation, borrowing the
prophecy of Amos, " Behold the days come, saith
the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the
land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord," ^ and

1 N. S. Shaler, The Interpretation of Nature, p. 46.

2 Amos 7iii. 11-13.

14 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

pointing to his own land for its fulfillment : " And
to-day also the fair virgins and young men look in
vain from one sea to the other ; from no rock
bursts the spring which shall quench the thirst of
the soul ; the divine word is not in Ibsen, and it
is not in Tolstoi even, and neither from the North
nor from the East cometh the light." ^ These
three voices, of poet, man of science, and critic,
are not isolated and unique ; typical are they
rather, and representative ; they speak the temper
of the time; they breathe the feeling of multi-
tudes of men and women all around us, unfamil-
iar with discovery or research, yet touched and
troubled by this atmosphere of unrest, with no
firm hold on the certainties of the unseen, but
conscious that the things which can be seen and
weighed and measured can never feed the hunger
of the heart. In such an age, the need for min-
istry has surely not been outgrown : was It ever
greater than now ? " From my earliest childhood,"
a physician once said to me, " I can never remem-
ber a time when the sight of physical pain did not

1 J. Darmesteter, Les Prophetes d'Israel, iv. " Et au-
jonrd'hui auasi les belles flUes et les jeunes gens regardent
en vain d'une mer k I'autre ; de nul locher ne jaillit la
source oh. dtancher la soif de I'ame : la parole divine n'est
point dans Ibsen et elle n'est point dans Tolstoi meme, et ni
du Nord ni du Levant ne vient la lumifere."

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION 15

call out in me the instant impulse and effort to
relieve it." No diploma from the schools could
have conferred on him a better title to practice
medicine ; no emolument of fame or money could
equal the charm he found in his profession. In
the presence of spiritual suffering, the minister of
Christ must feel a kindred impulse : with this im-
pulse in his heart, he may hear his Master's call
in the half unconscious need and longing of his
fellow-men, and, never more truly than to-day,
may enter through the service and relief of his
brethren into the very joy of his Lord. " My
idea of heaven," said Tennyson, " is to be engaged
in perpetual ministry to souls in this and other
worlds." ^ And the saintly hero of whom Whittier
sings, served troubled souls around him, and found
in that service the highest blessing : —

" He forgot his own soul for others,
Himself to his neighbor lending :
He found his Lord in his suffering brothers,
And not in the clouds descending." ^

But impulse alone, however unselfish, is not
enough for service. Effort must be trained and di-
rected, to become effective ; sympathy must be broad-
ened and made intelligent, before it can give relief.

1 Quoted from conversation, by Agnes Grace Weld, in the
Contemporary Review, March, 1893.

2 John G. Whittier, G. L. S.

16 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

The preacher must know the truth he brings and
the times he serves. The pastor must study
closely society around him, as well as the individual
hearts to whom he is called to minister. The
changes of our age have been felt in all these
directions : in them all, the new conditions and the
new spirit must be recognized and understood.
The problems to be met are more varied and com-
plex than those of old. But the higher life rises
in its level, the more complex it grows of neces-
sity, and the more varied it becomes, the greater
the charm of study and service. The play of
changeful circumstance across a background calm
and unchanging delights the eye and the mind. It
is the charm of the mountain in its eternal pa-
tience, touched to new meanings by moving masses
of shadow ; of the sea, forever tranquil below the
restless tossing of the waves ; of the sky in its
pure untroubled depths of blue, far above the pass-
ing clouds of gold and amber. It is the charm of
the highest poetry from ^schylus to Shakespeare,
of the unshaken mind of Prometheus in contrast
with the turbid wrath of Zeus and the trembling
terror of his creatures ; of the calm constancy of
Cordelia and the white purity of Desdemona amid
the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of passion
all around them. Realized in its deeper meaning,
it has been the strength of prophets and martyrs

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 17

and apostles, who, through the things that could be
seen and shaken, held fast to the things unseen and
unchanging. And through all the changes of to-
day, the charm and strength alike are his who,
while others cling to broken spars of scattered
truths, rests firmly on that Providence which
shapes and guides the course of men and ages by
ways unsearchable but sure, —

" That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element.
And one far-ofE divine event,
To which the whole creation moves." ^

With this spirit and confidence, we turn to study
more closely the effects produced by the changed
conceptions and conditions of to-day in the several
directions already indicated : first, in the meaning
and interpretation of the minister's message ;
second, upon the society to which he speaks ; and
third, in the individual lives entrusted to his
special care. In each direction, if his task has
become more difficult and complex, the attraction
is also doubled, while the sense of life with its con-
tinuity and its progress, ever varied yet forever
one, has grown larger, deeper, and more absorb-
ing.

I. The source of his message claims our first

^ Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, last stanza.
2

18 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

attention. The preacher is always the minister
of the Word, and the Scriptures remain the chan-
nel of the divine message. But there is a wide
difference between the ways in which men have
iregarded and used the Scriptures. The humble
soul indeed has always found here the hidden
manna. The great preachers, preachers who have
moved men's hearts as the trees of the wood are
moved with the wind, have never failed to draw
their fire and energy from this source. These
results have been possible under interpretations,
crude and literal on the one hand, wild and vi-
sionary on the other. They prove the power of
the Spirit through all the hindrance of the flesh.
Patristic allegory, mediaeval myth and legend, the
mystic's glowing imagination, the hard prosaic
system of the literalist, — not one, nor all, of these
could always dim the heavenly light. But while
we recognize the Providence that overruled human
folly, we find therein no sanction for these false
and forced interpretations of the Word.

The great, creative ages in the Church rose to
larger views of the Scriptures, and caught glimpses
of the richly varied wisdom they reveal. But the
mechanism of dogma, or the fanciful search for
symbols, soon closed in and hindered the influence
of the freer conception. To-day the revolution
throughout all realms of thought has transformed

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 19

the study of the Bible also. Mechanical concep-
tions, the absurdities of symbolism, have gone, to
return no more. The new method affects even
those who least accept the critical result. That
method of thinking you cannot escape, if you think
at all. And the distinctive feature of this new
conception of Scripture is the same which was
pointed out before, the sense of life, in all its
wonderful variety and movement, throughout the
whole. Luther discovered that Paul's words were
living things, with hands and feet. We have
found that every Scripture, —

" If out deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." ^

The special questions of criticism it does not fall
within my province to discuss. They must be left
to competent hands. They do not belong to the
preacher's sphere. They demand a combination of
time, talents, and patient training which he cannot
give. Hasty verdicts in this department by men
of good intentions, but deficient in modesty and
judgment, are as unfortunate as verdicts of kin-
dred character and origin upon strictly scientific
questions. A common training in theology, and a
reader's familiarity with the languages In which
the Bible was written, enable the preacher to fol-
1 Mrs. Browning, Lady Geraldine's Courtship.

20 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

low the general trend of criticism with intelligence
and advantage, but no more entitle him to pro-
nounce upon difficult and disputed points than the
physician's license and practice make him a com-
petent judge in the special questions of biology.
But the preacher's great message will not grow less
clear, strong, and imperative as he faces new inter-
pretations of the Scriptures. And if he follows
carefully the advance of enlightened and reverent
scholarship, he will welcome the largest, freest
investigation, waiting with patience the slow re-
sults of years, very confident that the treasure is
not less heavenly because the vessels are earthen,
and that here also the Lord hath more truth and
light yet to break forth out of his holy Word.

But there are special ways in which this changed
conception of the Scriptures and their organic life
must widen and vitalize the preacher's use of the
Word, and enlarge the interest and power of his
ministry. Of these effects, some are negative,
some positive.

A higher regard for the original meaning and
relation of each separate Scripture is a first evident
advantage to the preacher. The fantastic treat-
ment of the Bible by the pulpit of other days,
sometimes, alas ! in our own, is familiar to all.
Like the Master's raiment in the hands of the
Roman soldiery, the sacred vesture of Scripture

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 21

has been rent asunder and the division made by
lot. If these irreverent extremes have been rare,
how often passages have been used with little care
for their first sense and connection ! Texts, torn
from the woven fabric, have been held up in
shreds and patches : words, robbed of their right-
ful meaning, forced to yield strange, unnatural
senses, by trick of translation or outward resem-
blance. I need hardly allude to further distortion
by which the plainest passages were turned to
mysticism or metaphysics. AU this is possible,
while Scripture is regarded as mechanism or dead
anatomy. All this becomes impossible, when Scrip-
ture is felt to be informed with full, pervading,
breathing life.

The preacher who feels this life informing all
the Scriptures will shrink from the plain irrever-
ence of all careless vivisection. His texts will not
be isolated, nor their natural meaning strained.
Neither indolence nor timidity will tempt him to
take up current mistranslations or renderings mis-
applied. His Bible will never become an armory
of weapons for controversy, nor a quarry whence
stones may be cut to buttress mediaeval or modern
theories. He will not overlook the broad sweep
of Revelation, on the one hand ; he will not force
one doubtful passage on the other, — not even to
save the consistency of the whole. Open and

22 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

sensitive to changing light, his errors may be
outgrown, and his truths will never become stereo-
typed in lifeless formulas.

Each several Scripture will thus have an indi-
vidual teaching, and, as a second advantage, the
preacher's message will gain in variety, in point,
in force. The dullness of mere repetition is a
besetting temptation of the pulpit. When the
Bible is only a book of texts, all equally available
at every turn, the narrowness of the preacher's
mind and experience becomes the measure and
limit of his teaching. The same meagre round of
truth and duty, viewed in the same familiar light,
cast in the same monotonous forms, will make up
his weekly burden. Each mind is only a pool,
stagnant and unwholesome, unless its life is con-
stantly renewed by currents from without. How
changed, then, the preacher's message becomes,
when at every point he touches the varied life of
Scripture ! Each scene, each character, each ut-
terance, has a meaning of its ovsti, the common
truths take individual color and force, and the
whole range of his teaching is widened. It was
his faithful study of rock and brook, with the
humblest wild flower on the edge of each, that lent
varied grace to Sir Walter Scott's descriptions.
He who follows Nature closely makes her lavish
wealth in some measure his own. And he who

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 23

draws from each Scripture its individual lesson
will never become the slave of dullness and repe-
tition.

Beyond the enrichment of each several inter-
pretation, the new sense of life and power flowing
through all Revelation counts as a blessing to the
preacher. Inspiration itself he cannot conceive
as confined within an artificial reservoir, motionless
through all time, unchanged in form, in depth, in
level ; he views it as a river, rather, with widening,
deepening course from source to sea ; he feels its
presence as a divine life, mingling with the currents
of human life, revealed through individual and
national history, with ever growing depth and
clearness. With such a vision, dogmatic losses, if
losses they be, are transmuted into higher gain.
The power of Eevelation the preacher finds not
static but dynamic, not mechanical but vital. It
comes from life, it flows through life ; the life of
a chosen race under the old dispensation, the life
of a widening church under the new ; the individ-
ual life of prophet and apostle under both. And
in the blending of divine and human at every
stage, neither element is lost or lessened: both
become broader and deeper with each further un-
folding, until the heart turns to the Spirit through
all Scripture as the most devout of our poets turns
to the Word Incarnate : —

24 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

" Deep strike thy roots, O heavenly Vine,
Within our earthly sod.
Most human and yet most divine,
The flower of man and God." ^

Both the larger life of race and church aud the
individual life of prophet and apostle have become
more human, more real, and thus are brought into
closer relation to other life, to our own lives. The
sacred story, no longer isolated, but subject like
other history to change and growth, becomes more
truly a lesson for the world. Around the name of
the great Lawgiver, the Law of Israel grows by
successive layers and accretions, like the codes of
Rome or England. Beneath the shadow of Solo-
mon, the proverbs which a nation's wisdom has
coined through generations from many dies are
gathered in one golden treasury. Through the
Psalter, set first in tune to David's harp, but richer
and more varied in tone than any individual life,
the Jewish Church pours forth her strains of
changing experience through ages of sorrow, exUe,
exultation, sweeps the wide gamut of religious feel-
ing, and blends in her eternal song the sigh of each
burdened heart with the aspiration of the whole
church of God.

The revelation through individual life, also, has
become richer and more distinct. Each prophet
^ John G. Whittier, Our Master.

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 25

stands in his own place and bears his own message :
he is not a moutlipiece but a voice, not a pen but
a person, a preacher of righteousness first to his
age, and then to later ages. Even if his name is
lost, we feel his heart and life : the second Isaiah
is not less real a presence than the first. And
from the broken sobs of Hosea and the scathing
philippic of Amos to the richer personality of Jere-
miah, sensitive, tender, passionate, each prophet's
power is doubled when we feel the man below the
message. Restored to their local setting, the Epis-
tles of the New Testament are filled with life again :
the needs of the readers become as real as the
writer's heart. Through the Gospels even, uncon-
scious touches betray the Evangelist, his personal
feeling and his point of view.

The Scriptures plainly grow more human under
this changed conception ; but, further, they become
thereby not less but more divine. As the human
life in prophet and apostle, in race and church,
grows more real to the preacher's thought, and
comes closer to his heart and life to-day, so the
divine life through all is felt as richer and more
real. Revelation through life is, of necessity,
larger than Revelation through mechanism ; and
the higher and more varied the life through which
it flows, the deeper and richer Revelation itself be-
comes. At every stage of the sacred story the

26 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

Spirit, we feel, breathes upon the Word ; while in
the movement, progress, life, m'aking the whole
organic, we find a larger revelation of divine, cre-
ative thought. Whatever similarities are discov-
ered between the earlier Scriptures and the records
of other races, there can be no question of a higher
purpose, a purer motive, moulding the common
material. No prophetic message fails to disclose
some clearer insight than before was given ; no
psalm but mingles inspiration with aspiration.
And from the first faint dawn of the Protevange-
lium to the broad noonday of the Gospel, from the
earliest strivings of the Spirit with man to the
perfect man in Christ, is discerned, now dimly,
now more clearly, that " one far-o£E divine event,
to which " Kevelation like " the whole creation
moves."

Above all else, however, the distinct and abso-
lute supremacy of the Master, in his Person and in
his claim, is the largest gain the preacher finds in
the changed conception of the Scriptures. Always
recognized in theory of course, this supremacy has
been sadly forgotten in fact. The Roman Church
has put the Person of Peter in his Master's place :
Protestanism has too often put the teaching of Paul
before, if not above, his Master's word. Peter's
language to Cornelius, " Stand up ; I myself also
am a man," and Paul's indignant disclaimer at

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 27

Lystra, " Sirs, why do ye these things ? We also
are men of like passions with you," may teach us
how both apostles would have refused this bor-
rowed worship. But a higher voice has spoken :
" One is your Master : and all ye," — Paul and
Peter among the rest, — " all ye are brethren."
From these temptations of the past, the preacher
of to-day is free. He cannot longer bring the New
Testament down to the level of the Old ; he cannot
make Christ the Interpreter of Paul. The very
limitation and finiteness of the human servant set
off the higher glory of the divine, the only begotten
Son. Reflected through different hearts and lives,
the Person of the Master shines forth the more
transcendent : contrasted with all broken lights
before Him and after Him, with the divers por-
tions and divers manners of prophetic revelation,
TToXv/iepuis Koi TrohjTpoirois, or with the partial vision
to which even Paul confessed, apn yivuxTKoi Ik fuepovg.
His teaching regains its rightful place and its
unique authority. His supreme Revelation be-
comes the crown and centre of the preacher's mes-
sage. " Back to Christ " is the watchword for all
interpretation of the past : " Onward to Christ,"
the call of the Spirit for to-day. With this result
secure, the changing cloud of criticism that over-
shadows us may be dark or bright, we need not
fear to enter it ; other voices may grow silent, other

28 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

forms may fade, one Form will still remain, — One
Voice will still speak from tlie cloud : " This is my
beloved Son ; hear him."

Such, then, is the source of the preacher's mes-
sage to-day. Such is the living "Word he is sent
to interpret to his age. The largest, profoundest
learning he can command, he may well call to his
aid. From other literatures and histories and
faiths he may draw whatever lessons they can
teach. He may welcome all new light of scholar-
ship, discovery, research. But with a Scripture so
varied and vital in every part, informed and knit
together by one organic growing life, in the highest
sense both human and divine, a hundred broken
rays of one Eternal Light, he need not fear that
his study wiU lose its interest, or his source of in-
spiration be exhausted.

II. A second broad direction in which the min-
ister is affected by the changed conditions of to-
day is in the sphere and local setting of his work.
The community, society, the church, each of these
three concentric circles that surround his life,
shares the stir and restless movement of the age.
Throughout our country, in New England as in
the West, in village as in city, the changes the age
has wrought, and the contrast with thirty years
ago, are many and striking. These changes the
preacher must take into account if he would adapt

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 29

Ms message to present needs ; these new conditions
will absorb the pastor's closest study and task his
best intelligence.

An English country parson of to-day, less quaint
in flavor but more virile than his earlier name-
sake, speaking for his brethren, counts the " abso-
lute finality" of their position its most cheerless
and trying feature. " Dante's famous line," he
writes, " ought to be carved upon the lintel of
every country parsonage in England. When the
new rector on his induction takes the key of the
church, locks himself in, and tolls the bell, it is his
own passing bell that he is ringing." And again :
" This boasted fixity of tenure is the weak point,
not the strong one ; it is movement we want among
us, not stagnation." ^ This fixity, this finality
might have been found in many a New England
parish fifty years ago; how strange and remote
these conditions seem to us to-day ! The frequent
changes in modern pastorates are due in part no
doubt to the unhappy restlessness of people and
pastor ; in part, also, it must be admitted, they
grow out of the larger and more varied demands
now made upon the minister, exhausting his
strength and necessitating relief through change
of field. A pastorate of ten years brings more

1 Augustus Jessopp, The Trials of a Country Parson,
pp. 85, 94.

30 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

of varied experience to the pastor now than a pas-
torate of twenty years once brought And even
the nearest parishes differ so widely from one
another to-day that every change involves the
awakening of new interests and the careful study
of new conditions and problems.

While the pastorate remains the same, more-
over, the parish undergoes a constant, all-pervad-
ing change. Ten years mean more in the parish
now than twenty years meant half a century ago.
The whole complexion, the very atmosphere, of our
social life a single generation has changed. In
cities and large towns the difference is recognized
at once : it is real, though less perceptible, in vil-
lages also. The sleepiest hamlet, stagnant and
duller to the stranger's eye

" than the fat weed
That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf," '

has not escaped untouched; the patient observer
finds, the pastor feels, even there the pathos and
the tragedy of hidden change.

Twenty-five years ago, the typical New England
village was homogeneous in character and simple
in life. Hardly a foreigner could be found among
a population born and bred in the same commu-
nity, for the most part in the same houses. Di-
versities there were, for our New England stock
' Shakespeare, Hamlet, i. 5.

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 31

has always been rich in original varieties, but the
common types of character, the broad currents of
habit, thought, and life remained unchanged al-
most for generations. Neighbors in place were
neighbors in fact, and the life of the village was
like the life of a large and overgrown family. The
church was easily the centre of social interest, and
the Sunday meeting drew families together from
scattered farms, the sole relief to the monotony
and unvarying routine of daily life. How differ-
ent the New England village of to-day! The
homogeneous life, broken up within, has grown
heterogeneous from without, almost cosmopolite
indeed. The great tides of immigration, setting
in for years from every part of Europe, and later
from Asia also, have turned aside from the broad
course of the West, overflowed the bounds of the
city, and reached the larger villages ; while the
less noticed influx from the provinces on our
Northern border has been felt in smaller ham-
lets and scattered farms. In outward aspect, in
population, affected in her turn and measure like
the other States, New England remains no more
the staid, conservative, unchanging community of
thirty years ago.

Under this outward aspect, deeper and more
vital differences are found. Industrial changes,
added to the change of population, have modified

32 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

our social customs, individual habits, ways of
thought. The framework of society is subtly al-
tered. Interests are isolated, men have grown
apart: a common feeling is lost, mutual indiffer-
ence succeeds, classes are strongly marked and
separated. The simpler conditions of the past
have gone ; relations "grow strained, new social
problems arise, ethical questions become multi-
plied and complex. Differences in thought and
life, growing out of differences of inheritance,
birth, training, and association, are not lightly
overcome. Men misunderstand one another, and
a common standard is lost.

Nor can these difficulties be studied in their
local setting alone. The little world of the village
opens by a hundred avenues into the larger world
without. Intercourse is unbroken ; the daily paper
carries the common thought, opinion, prejudice,
to the farthest point, diffuses common intelligence
and common ignorance, and makes all problems,
all troubles, however local or distant in their be-
ginnings, a burden to be borne by all. The tide
of change reaches the remotest village with restless
ebb and flow, and the mighty pulses of the great
world's life are felt to-day in the lowliest hamlet.

Under such conditions, what new significance is
given to Wesley's motto, in whichever way the
words are turned ! " My parish is the world,"

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 33

every pastor may say, as be reflects on all the di-
verse elements that meet in the smallest commu-
nity, and remembers from what distant quarters
these elements have been drawn ! " The world is
my parish," he may add, when he finds his peo-
ple's thoughts and feelings affected by events so
far away, and feels their lives drawn slowly but
surely into the current of the great world's move-
ment! Is stagnation necessary in such a pastor-
ate ? Is it even possible ?

But the pastor must be more than a passive ob-
server, a curious and interested witness, in the
midst of these shifting scenes ; he must be an
actor on the stage. Nor is it enough, if his in-
dividual part is taken well; he is called to give
motive and harmony to the movement of others.
Here is incentive to largest effort: here is room
for the exercise of patience, the discipline of
thought, sagacious and far-sighted. Has any age
made more demands than this?

The church cannot remain untouched by these
changes all around her ; she must hear and heed
the call of each new occasion. If her members
grow lethargic, it is the pastor's task to awaken
them, and set more clearly before their eyes the
duties of to-day. In each community, along all
lines of modern movement, in society, business,
politics, the highest Christian principle, as already
2

34 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

understood, needs to be made effective and para-
mount by the influence of an aroused, united
church. Religious problems, also, more complex
than in other days, demand for their solution
larger intelligence and charity, sympathy and
patience. The diverse elements in every church,
all ages and all classes, must be not simply har-
monized, but lifted into some broader union, knit
together as members of one body by diverse yet
mutual service. Organization, so potent a factor
in all our work to-day, must be extended here and
informed with life, until the church has brought
her special blessing near the whole community and
home to every heart. Above all, the old, original
gospel, a common Father, a common Master, a
common brotherhood, a common life, pure, sweet,
and strong, as in the earliest Christian age, freed
from all subtleties of metaphysics, whether Greek
or Roman, whether mediaeval or modern, made
plain to meet each daily need, most human be-
cause most divine, must come with growing clear-
ness from the preacher's lips, and through the life
of preacher and of people too, until all men under-
stand and feel its power. How large, how diffi-
cult, this task must prove, how slowly its results
will come, no pastor need be told. But he who
in the hardest field holds this ideal steadfastly be-
fore his own eyes and before his church, finds

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 35

interest and courage as the years go on; and he
who believes the gospel still divine will never
doubt the large fulfillment yet to come. Mean-
while, the very discipline of every day develops
mind and heart, enlarges his experience, deepens
his love for all humanity around him, and gives
his ministry an ever varied and absorbing claim
and charm.

III. A third and last direction in which the
minister feels the changed conditions of to-day is
in the cure of souls. I like this good old phrase
which has too largely passed out of use. It lays
the emphasis on the pastor's special work; it
makes distinct and imperative the individual rela-
tion in which he stands to every member of his
church and parish, the claim of every heart on his
peculiar care.

This close and individual relation to every soul
has always been ideal, rather than actual, indeed ;
an object to be held in view, not an end at any
time attained. And the possibilities of fulfilling
this charge to-day would seem at first far less
than in other days. To the ordinary observer, in-
deed, there is no respect in which the function
of the ministry and the life of the parish have
changed more evidently and more completely than
this. We have read in religious histories and
memoirs, and our mothers and fathers have told

86 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

us, how the minister of other days made his stated
round of the parish, gathering each family to-
gether in turn, the parents with their children,
and questioning each person in regard to his spir-
itual welfare and his knowledge of the Bible and
the catechism. This custom has wholly passed
away, and cannot be revived under present condi-
tions ; and this, it is said, was clearly faithful pas-
toral work, a true cure of souls, in place of which
no regular and systematic method has been de-
vised, and for which the desultory and often in-
judicious teaching of the modern Sunday-school is
at best a very imperfect substitute. Of the value
of this custom in its time and place, and as wisely
used, I have no doubt : of the decline in religious
knowledge among our people, whatever the cause
may be, I fear there can be no question ; and of
the insufficiency of the Sunday-school at its best
to take the place of definite personal teaching I
am also profoundly convinced. But, for all this,
the custom here described was never in a strict
sense the cure of souls, whatever opportunity it
may have opened for further acquaintance with
individual hearts ; it belonged to the preacher, to
the teacher at least, not distinctively to the pastor.
Catechizing, however useful and excellent, must
not be confounded with the cure of souls. And
the pastor never has fulfilled his charge until his

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 87

own soul meets the soul he would help, alone, un-
distracted, with all the freedom and confidence of
personal intimacy. This highest form of ministry-
was needed and was exercised in other days : it
cannot be outgrown ; the need, and the opportu-
nity, were never greater, I believe, than now.

The very absence of that religious training com-
mon in the past makes this need of personal min-
istry the greater. Fifty years ago, every man of
average intelligence in a New England parish had
his memory stored with accepted truths : they were
held in the head, it may be, not in the heart ; the
formulas in which they were cast were narrow and
rigid ; grave errors grew around the truths, crude
superstitions mingled with the teaching in the
hearer's mind ; but the truths were there, unques-
tioned, lodged firmly in the thought, a safeguard
against temptation, an anchor in trouble. To-day,
no such reserve force remains to the man of aver-
age intelligence. The old superstitions are gone,
but the truths, once solid, seem to him shaken too.
He has not thought beyond them, or away from
them ; he has only been caught up and carried
along, unthinking, by the current around him.
He has lost the partial, outward support of tradi-
tional, inherited, almost unconscious beliefs ; he
has not found the inward surety of personal faith ;
he feels himself unanchored, on the open sea.

38 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

adrift. What he needs is the strength of a brave,
calm, Christian friendship, of a faith incarnate in
another's life, intelligent, broad, and open of
mind ; fearless, also, because sure of itself, and
far more sure of the Master; able thus in His
Name to reach out the hand of ready helpfulness,
revealing life through life. Through such faith
and friendship, the pastor must fulfill his charge
in common life to-day.

Others there are in every parish, fewer in num-
ber than the class just mentioned, for whom this
personal ministry is yet more needful. These are
the young and thoughtful minds, interested in all
living movements of our age, sensitive to the mod-
ern spirit, questioning all forms, all facts, all
faiths, to find a higher truth. Bound by no tra-
ditions of the past, unfettered by present conven-
tion, they seem to timid minds irreverent. Among
older and religious people, both deference and dis-
cretion may keep them silent ; but the silence only
hides the widening distance between their thoughts
and the beaten paths behind them. These spirits
also need a friend to win their slow and jealous
confidence, call out their full confession, enter into
their every doubt ; a friend of riper years, taught
from his own experience, trained in the Master's
school to understanding, sympathy, and patience :
skillful to lead, not force, their steps from the few

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 39

things they still find true to the higher truth not
found as yet ; able to reveal that higher truth
through life before the laggard thought has
learned the way. This task of faith and friend-
ship, this personal ministry, may fall indeed to
any brave, strong, tender Christian soul ; it needs
the inward grace alone, no laying on of hands im-
parts the heavenly gift ; but the pastor must
surely count this service a sacred, most impor-
tant part of his mission.

These spirits, and not the men of easier faith
and lighter thought, must shape and mould the
movement of the church that is to be; out of
their difficulties, their doubts, once overcome, their
usefulness and strength will grow ; their own ex-
perience will discipline them to broader, better ser-
vice. The pastor who wins them builds not for
the present only, but for the future; he serves
another generation beside his own ; he reaches
through these consecrated lives a wider circle than
his eyes can measure, or his faith can foresee.

How delicate, how difficult, under these condi-
tions the pastor's task has grown ! What fine rare
gifts of nature and of grace this personal minis-
try demands ! What heavenly wisdom must blend
with human tenderness in him who is called to dis-
charge this service ! Like the Great Angel of the
Gate, in Dante's Vision, the pastor of to-day must

40 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

bear two keys, one of gold and one of silver. The
golden key is the symbol of his true authority
within the church, received from Christ himself.
The silver key, which always he first puts in use,
betokens that wisdom of spiritual adaptation,
taught through experience and lowly patience, by
which he learns to discern and deal with each
heart aright : —

" Pill cara 6 1' una ; ma 1' altra vuol troppa
D' arte e d' ingegno, avanti che disserri,
Perch' ell' k quella che il nodo disgroppa." ^

" There was no Iron," says a quaint old Eng-
lish writer, — " There was no Iron in any of the
Stuff or Utensils of the Sanctuary. Hard and In-
flexible Spirits are not fit for the Service of the
Church." 2 The Hard Church, a modern essayist
styles men of this type and temper ; and their
unfitness for the delicate task before us, his own
words well point out. " The Hard Church," he
writes, " necessarily relies on what may be called
the inorganic laws of human thought and action,
and ignores the more delicate laws of growth and
change discoverable in social and individual char-
acter." ^ How fatal this omission ! Here lies the

1 Dante, Purgatorio, vol. ix. lines 124^126.

2 John Edwards, The Preacher, vol. i. p. 169.
' R. H. Hutton, Theological Essays, p. 340.

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 41

key to the whole difficulty ; and here, by contrast,
we learn what type and temper the pastor's task
to-day demands. " The inorganic laws of human
thought and action," — how narrow their sphere
has grown ! " In social and individual charac-
ter," how much more clearly " the delicate laws of
growth and change" are now discerned! With
life, not mechanism, the pastor deals to-day ; and
life, subtle and elusive everywhere, above all in
the human spirit, cannot be rudely grasped ; it
yields alone to the finer touch of love. By under-
standing, sympathy, and patience, this delicate
charge must be fulfilled; and as these graces of
the spirit grow, the pastor's life will bring to
others, and to himself, the larger blessing.

In the duties of the pastorate, then, as in the
broader field of public service and in the inter-
pretation of the Scriptures to his age, the minister
of Jesus Christ is called to-day to a mission of
unmeasured possibilities and growing power. In
this direction, also, as in those already followed,
the claim of the ministry is as clear, its work as
large, and its attraction as strong as in other days.

Thus, in a manner of necessity discursive, but
not desultory, as I hope, I have followed the broad
lines along which my subject seemed to lead.
"With all the widening changes in thought and
life to-day, changes affecting our conditions and

42 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

our conceptions also, the place and claim of the
Christian ministry, we find, remain. And if any
of its glories, as the world may count them, have
passed away, they were only outward : the glory
which abides is alone inward and excelleth. Non
m/inistrari, sed ministrare, was the Master's
motto ; in ministry, in personal service, not in
any honors of place or power, preacher and pastor
find their true distinction. Such service the world
still needs, needs more indeed for the very changes
of the present : a ministry, deep, earnest, spirit-
ual, that speaks from life, — through life, — to
life. And with a Scripture to interpret, no longer
a dead letter but a living Word, in a society so
rich in varied life and movement, to hearts on
every hand that yearn for light and help, no more
absorbing charge can claim the consecrated soul
than such a ministry.

The limitations * of my theme have made my
view but partial. The great, eternal features of
the preacher's and the pastor's work have been
lightly touched : the interests which are not changed
have not come within my purpose. My task has
been to seize distinctive features created or empha-
sized at least by the changed conditions of to-day.
The highest feature I have reserved until the last.
I count this an inestimable blessing to preacher
and pastor alike : that never more truly than now.

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 43

under no conditions more fully than under ours,
has the minister been called to personal following
of his Master, both in the method of his work and
in the source and spring of his power. The only-
authority that carries moral and spiritual weight
to-day is the authority of character. And the
character of Jesus Christ the world makes its only
standard for judging the motives and conduct of
his disciples. However impatient it may be with
creed and dogma and ritual, it recognizes under
all differences of name and communion kinship in
deed and character with Him ; and for such kinship
it shows profoundest reverence. To be like Him
must always be the minister's ideal ; but lower
standards and confusing tests of men how often
divert the mind from the higher purpose ! How
helpful it should prove, when the world's own
expectation seeks that supreme and single level!
Again, the methods of the Master's ministry, so
personal, so delicate, so carefully adapted to indi-
vidual need, were never more in keeping with the
pastor's work than now. And as he studies in
each detail the Master's tenderness and searching
insight, or strives and prays to catch the gracious
spirit that informs the living gospel as a whole,
his inward life must grow in likeness to his Lord
with each new measure that he gains of the three-
fold gift of ministry, — understanding, sympathy,
and patience.

44 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY:

For thirteen years it has been my privilege to
share the work of preacher and of pastor. That
work I leave with sincere reluctance, and only at
the call of what seems a nearer, but I dare not
say a higher, duty. Through all these years, the
present opportunity and the great ideal of this
calling have grown upon me, until I feel that every
preacher, like St. Paul, should glorify his ministry;
Sofa^ci) is the Apostle's word. But when I remember
how far achievement lags behind ideal, how even
this imperfect picture I have drawn puts the reality
to shame, I am moved to borrow from St. Gregory,
the earliest and still the keenest analyst of the
pastor's charge, his closing words : —

" Dum monstrare qualis esse debeat pastor In-
vigilo, pulchrura depinxi hominem pictor f oedus :
aliosque ad perfectionis littus dirigo, qui adhuc in
delictorum fluctibus versor." ^

It has been the honor of this seat of sacred
learning, it has been the honor of this special chair
into which I am now inducted, that it has stead-
fastly upheld a high ideal of the Christian minis-
try. My three more immediate predecessors had
each a distinct and important part in this great
work. One sketched in broad and masterly out-
line the ideal of a strong and Intellectual preacher.

^ S. Gregorii Magni, Regulce Pastoralis Liber, sub fine.

PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 45

Another filled in the picture with almost infinite
fineness of detail. The third inspired the preach-
er's heart with visions of wider fields of service and
of conquest. To keep these fair ideals fresh and
living still, as in the dear and memorable days
gone by, and to help my younger brethren to
realize and seize the growing opportunities, the
urgent claims, the distinctive attractions, of the
ministry to-day, is the task to which, with the
blessing of God, I would now devote my life.

LECTUEES ON HOMILETICS.

I.

Introduction. — Explanation of Terms. — Primitive and
Fnndamental Elements in Preaching.

HoMiLETics, it must be premised at the begin-
ning of our discussion, is at once a science and an
art : it covers both the theory and the practice of
preaching, " A science," says Whewell, himself
a passed master in both departments, " a science
teaches us to know ; an art, to do." The distinc-
tion is well drawn and concisely stated ; it has an
evident value in giving definiteness and precision
to our use of terms : but doing, we must not for-
get, can never be really divorced from knowing,
and in the higher arts and sciences, especially,
the relations between theory and practice are most
subtle and vital. The distinction of Whewell,
therefore, must be supplemented by the earlier
dictum of Dr. Campbell : " AU art is founded in
science, and the science is of little value which
does not serve as a foundation to some beneficial
art." In the study now before us, at least, both
statements must be held clearly in mind, and the

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 47

inferences which follow from each should be car-
ried to their just conclusion.

Preaching, then, is an art. And art, by its very-
name, implies adaptation : it implies training, also,
discipline, acquired skill, superadded to any and
to all native gifts. We need not long delay over
the old objection, so often brought forward and
refuted, which, from the peculiar sacredness of his
calling, declared the preacher free from all rules,
from all human art. This objection has passed
away, together with the kindred idea of genius as
something above all law, a law unto itself alone.
Genius, we have learned, is not emancipation
from law, unfettered lawlessness and caprice : it
is, rather, the finer, higher, more perfect fulfill-
ment of law, drawn from insight instead of reason-
ing, and wrought out in a freer, often an uncon-
scious spirit. Inspiration, also, in the preacher as
in the Word he is sent to interpret, is no irregu-
lar, spasmodic, uncertain impulse; it respects the
nature which it informs ; it works, not above nor
apart from, but through the laws of human intelli-
gence. Art, on the other hand, true art, is not
lifeless mechanism, a contradiction of nature ;
rather, it is the parallel, or better, the continuation
of nature, working through kindred and organic
laws toward a kindred end. There is no irrev-
erence, therefore, in the bold hyperbole of Sir

48 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

Thomas Browne, Nature is the art of God. And
Montaigne but expresses the same thought in sub-
tler, more impersonal form, when he writes : "II
faut que la nature s'artialise." The sacredness of
the ministry, then, suffers no detraction when we
speak of preaching as an art, and insist upon the
need of discipline and intelligent practice in him
who would discharge aright this sacred function.

Beside the art of preaching, there is a science
of preaching, also. The word, science, sounds at
first unnatural and incongruous in this connection,
but there is no other word to express the idea.
Theory is sometimes used, the Theory of Preach-
ing ; but the term is too subjective : it lacks the
outward solidity, the firmness, of established fact.
Science is our only term to cover a broad, com-
plete, systematic setting forth of the body of laws,
and of principles below those laws, on which all
art must rest. If all art, to borrow the language
of Dr. Campbell again, is founded in science, then
the larger, the more difficult and complex a given
art may be, the deeper must these foundations be
laid.^ The reign of empiricism is always narrow as

1 In practical art, says Whewell, principles are unseen
glides, leading ns by invisible strings through paths where
the end alone is looked at. It is for science to direct and
purge our vision, so that these airy ties, these principles and
laws, generalizations and theories, become distinct objects of
vision. — Quoted by Kidder, Homiletics.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 49

well as short-lived. The preacher whose art rests
on no broader basis than his own practice and
personal experience will find although knowledge
comes, that wisdom, which is far more important
and useful, lingers still. The broader, on the
other hand, the preacher's survey of his chosen
science, and the closer his study both of the mas-
ters of his special calling and of the principles
upon which all preaching rests, the more effective
and permanent his own work will become. There
is generally little originality in error. The larger
part of our own mistakes have been made many
times before us : we might have avoided them
had our intelligence been greater ; and knowledge
bought by experience costs too dear, if it comes
too late to be used. If we would put the ripened
wisdom of others, then, in place of that tardy
knowledge we ourselves might gain, if we would
anticipate thus the slow results of experience, we
must add science to art, or, better, we must build
our art on the broad, deep foundations of science.

There is, then, an art of preaching; there is a
science of preaching also ; and the relations which
bind them together are close and vital. You can-
not separate them without serious loss to both.
This is true in a measure of any study of homi-
letics, however theoretical that study may be, even
although it be taken up merely as an object of
4

50 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

curious interest, with no intent to carry the prin-
ciples discovered into practice. In nature and
essence, indeed, neither the art nor the science can
be understood apart from the other. But it is
true in still larger measure of the study as we now
approach it, with a practical purpose, and within
definite limits of time. Throughout the discussion
on which we enter, then, at every step we must
keep the art and the science side by side ; we must
remember the twofold truth, as art has its begin-
ning in science, so science has its end in art. Each
theory must be tested by practice ; all practice
must be measured and judged under the broader,
clearer light of theory. Both science and art, both
theory and practice, however, have their chief in-
terest and value for us in their distinct relation to
the actual work of the preacher, as they deepen
and enlarge the power and permanent effectiveness
with which he fulfils his sacred charge.

At this point, in a line with the considerations
already offered, certain familiar terms must be
noted and explained. The list is not long ; it is
not meant to be exhaustive ; such words alone are
chosen as throw some light by their derivation
and usage upon our study as a whole, and thus de-
velop stiU further the general idea of preaching
in its nature and essence. Where this purpose
is served, minuteness of detail may well be par-

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 51

doned. " Homiletics " and "homily," "sermon"
and " preaching," call for special attention and
definition.

Homiletics, like certain names of other and
more familiar sciences, like ethics, mathematics,
physics, for instance, though plural in form, is
treated to-day as a noun in the singular. Usage
even now, however, is not entirely uniform, and
before the present century it inclined in the other
direction, all these words being made plural in
syntax as well as form. The form itself has been
explained as, in part, an imitation of Greek usage
in words from which these terms were taken, to.
yidiKo., TO. (jivo-iKo., and, in part, as due to the range
and complexity of the subjects covered by the
sciences in question. But neither explanation can
be counted complete or satisfactory : both are
found wanting in the particular case before us.
If the range of subject covered be considered,
there is no reason why rhetoric, the genus, should
be in the singular, and homiletics, generally con-
sidered as a species, in the plural. And if Grreek
usage were to determine, homiletics, like mathe-
matics, should be singular in form. For the later
Greek of Plutarch, at least, recognized homiletic
as the art of conversation.

Homiletics and homily, to pass from the form
to the meaning, belong to a group of words, the

52 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

origin and relations of which it is not a piece of
pedantry, but a useful study to trace. The mean-
ing of this group in the New Testament, and in
the early church, must be noticed. "O/ttXos, the
original of the little group, has not been trans-
ferred to other and modern tongues : it occurs but
once in the New Testament, and there is omitted
by the best texts (Rev. xviii. 17), to describe the
crowd that throng the ships and witness the over-
throw of Babylon: a mingled multitude, united
by common fear and wonderment. '0/ttA.ta, the
original form of " homily," occurs but once also in
the New Testament, but in an unquestioned pas-
sage (1 Cor. XV. 33), in the verse borrowed by St.
Paul from the Thais of Menander, and restored
by the Revisers to its rightful meaning. " Evil
company," not communications, " doth corrupt
good manners," (ftOtipova-tv ^Orj xt"!"'^' ofiiXiai KaKaL
The verb, o/u,t\eiv, is found four times in the New
Testament. Twice it is used of the two disciples
on the way to Emmaus, " they communed with
each other, . . . while they communed together "
(Luke xxiv. 14, 15) ; once of St. Paul at Troas,
" and talked a long while " (Acts xx. 11) ; and
once of Felix, who, after the pointed preaching of
the apostle, " sent for him the oftener, and com-
muned with him " (Acts xxiv. 26).

These few instances show us how this group of

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 53

words passed from their first use, of a casual
crowd gathered by a slight and momentary inter-
est in common, through a regular and formal fel-
lowship, to the familiar converse, the friendly talk,
that made the delight of such association. In
classic Greek, these words had been used of the
communion and intercourse, and especially of the
enlightening conversation of philosophers with
their pupils. Xenophon applies them to Socrates
in the Memorabilia, I. ii. 6, 15. This further
meaning of instruction, some would find in the
o/itX^o-as of St. Paul at Troas. His conversation
there is supposed to have taken the form of expo-
sition, like the nt£7"T^, which formed part of the reg-
ular service in the synagogue, and which might be
delivered by priest, or elder, or any other compe-
tent person. Traces of this custom can be seen
both in the Acts and in the Gospels. The address
of the Master in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke
iv. 16-21) was such a ntl^Tl ; such also was the
word of exhortation which the rulers of the syna-
gogue asked of St. Paul and Barnabas at Anti-
oeh in Pisidia (Acts xiii. 15). From the syna-
gogue the custom was carried over to the church,
and the name of homily was early given to such
a discourse, in which, as Justin Martyr tells us
(Apol. c. 67), the minister admonishes the people,
stirring them up to an imitation of the good works

54 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

which have been brought before their notice. At
a later date, a more formal address was introduced
under the name of Xoyo's, but the simpler exposition
still held its place and was known as a homily.
Through the Latin Church, under the influence of
the Old French form, the word passed into our
language, together with its cognate and derivative
terms. Less common to-day than in older usage,
the homily preserves with us its special sense, and
is applied to a simple, homely, often informal ex-
position of scriptural teaching. Of such a char-
acter were the Books of Homilies set forth in the
reigns of Edward VI. and of Queen Elizabeth,
which were so long and so widely used in the Eng-
lish Church.

A gathered multitude ; a united and permanent
fellowship ; a common thought and language grow-
ing out of great interests held in common ; an ele-
ment of instruction, or, in broader and more spir-
itual terms, of ediflcation ; — these are the succes-
sive ideas which the history of this group of words
suggests. The suggestion goes far beyond the
narrow limits of the homily as now defined : it
marks the shape and color of the early conception
of all preaching ; it reaches in its effects the whole
science and art of homiletics. We pause, then,
to gather from this special study a further idea of
the character of Christian preaching at the begin-

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 55

ning, and to find therein certain fundamental ele-
ments which remain through all changes to mould
and direct our general conception of discourse in
the pulpit.

1. Christian preaching begins in the Christian
society : it has its roots in the Christian Church.
The 6;utXta proceeds from the ojxikoi. The college
of the apostles was the centre of the apostolic
ministry. The multitude of the disciples in the
upper room were the united and permanent fellow-
ship that antedated St. Peter's first sermon, and
from which the first preaching of the Word went
forth. And, however far the early missionaries
may have gone from the church at home, they
never forgot the bonds that united them with her
fellowship, nor suffered the strength and meaning
of their spiritual relation to her to be lost. They
were still, in St. Paul's significant phrase, apostles
of Christ, and apostles of the churches also, and the
glory of Christ, a,Tr6(rTo\oi iKKXyjcnav, Sofa Xpto'ToC.

This truth in the early conception of preaching
is not, and cannot be outgrown ; but, in churches
of freer form especially, it is far too often over-
looked. Where the emphasis is laid, as with our
churches, on no formal, outward union, but upon
unity of spirit within, there is the greater need
that the united, continuous, divine life through the
1 2 Cor. viii. 23.

56 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

individual church should be deeply realized by her
members. For the sake of others, then, and for
his own sake, on the very threshold of his minis-
try every preacher should feel his close relation
as a preacher to the organic life of the church he
serves. To feel and share this life before his work
begins will help him toward a true ideal of his
calling : to make his people also realize this com-
mon life with growing power is essential to the
fulfilment of his own great charge. As a preacher,
he must speak both to the church and from the
church unto the world. In each direction, his
words will gather force and impulse from the
united life he feels behind his utterance. In both
appeals he should speak, not as an individual
alone, but as the voice of a living community,
an eternal fellowship. Beside him, as the elders
stood by Ezra on his pulpit of wood, on the right
hand and the left, in spirit if not in form, stands
the church he represents, with which his life is
united : through his lips, wherever he carries the
message of the Gospel, both the Spirit and the
Bride say, Come ! And when he is called to teach
a deeper, larger truth within the church, through
this living fellowship he gains a clearer insight, a
broader sympathy, a more persuasive accent. The
experience of the church, when this common life is
touched, answers to his appeal and rises to better

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 57

understanding and service. No brilliant play of
individual, but isolated, genius, no personal, un-
shared experience even, however profound, can
equal in deep and permanent effect that preach-
ing which strikes its roots in Christian fellowship,
which speaks from the church to the church, and
through the church to men. From the o/iiXos comes
the ofiiXia still.

2. Christian preaching moves in the circle of
Christian truths. As preaching began within the
church, so it drew its theme from the common
source of Christian life. It dwelt with largest
emphasis, with strongest insistence, on the com-
mon truths on which the church was built. Its
spirit was exposition from the first : it sought to
sound more deeply, and bring forth more clearly,
the divine, revealed, indwelling Word. Even the
later, more formal address, no less than the sim-
pler homily, dwelt upon these central, distinctive.
Christian truths ; all else was incidental to the
development of these.

This feature of the primitive conception, also,
is fundamental and abiding. Christian preaching
has not exhausted, it cannot exhaust, the power
and meaning of the Gospel : it still moves, there-
fore, within the circle of Christian truths. JV^on
nova, sed nove, has ever been its motto. It seeks
to make the old, familiar truth felt with new force

58 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

rather than to discover some new message. It
finds the Word that came of old, when interpreted
by the living Spirit, made new to meet the chan-
ging needs of each generation, and proved thereby
both living and divine. The streams of life, which
always are flowing forth, reveal the living source
from which they are derived.

All this implies no narrowing of the preacher's
sympathies or of his research. It puts no check
upon the freedom of his movement, or the breadth
and keenness of his interest in any realm of hu-
man thought. It involves, indeed, a close and con-
stant study of whatever gives him a better under-
standing of his age, and of the Scriptures in their
largest, deepest meaning. It leaves his mind both
open and sensitive to every change in growth and
light, and his heart both hospitable and sympa-
thetic toward every form of genuine faith and
aspiration among men. But it implies, on the
other hand, his clear, profound conviction that the
Gospel of Jesus Christ alone contains enough of
truth and power, of light and heat, to redeem man-
kind, and create a new, divine type of character.
Such a conviction his study of the world with all
its forms and faiths may well confirm, as it makes
plain the universal need, while his personal know-
ledge of the unfailing power of the Gospel in its
present effects within him and around him will

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 59

give his message positiveuess, and point, and
fervor.

The great, distinctive Christian truths made the
strength of the earliest preachers ; they make the
strength of all vital preaching to-day. Not the
truths which the Gospel shares with earlier faiths,
not the interpretations which metaphysics puts
upon the plainest teaching, not the lesser, although
distinctive. Christian truths. The circle of great
truths, rather, Christ's revelation of the Father
and the Spirit, of man in the divine purpose, the
present failure and the largest possibility, of men
in their relation to one another and to Him, — these
are the dynamics of the preacher, here is his lever
with which to move the world. In this circle his
preaching will turn.

3. Christian preaching takes its rise in conver-
sation ; it is set in the conversational key. When
o/iiXia gained the special sense of speech, it carried
still the old associations, drawn from a broader,
but friendly, familiar intercourse. The warmth of
Christian fellowship was felt through the earliest
preaching, and inspired the name first applied to
such discourse. And when the statelier sermon
and the larger gathering of disciples seemed re-
mote from these humble beginnings, the greatest
of early preachers retained the glow, the homely
nearness, of the primitive form. Of Chrysostom's

60 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

addresses, a later writer says : " They are called
speeches [or sermons, Xdyoi], but they are more
like homilies, for this reason, above others, that he
again and again addresses his hearers as actually
present before his eyes." ^ The language, whether
compliment or censure, is striking.

It may be questioned whether oratory of any
kind is rightly set in any other key; whether at
least our present age admits a different style from
this. The speeches of John Bright and of Wendell
Phillips, and our generation has seen no orators
who take precedence of these two, have proved
that the conversational style leaves room for the
highest flights of eloquence, while it preserves
throughout the strength, the sanity, the absolute
reality of common speech. But whatever may be
said of other forms of public speaking, in preach-
ing, at least, this quality is indispensable. The
poet, as Wordsworth has taught us, no less than
the man of science, must compose with his eye
upon the object, if his verse is to share the reality,
the inevitableness, of nature. And the preacher
must think, and speak, and write, if write he must,
with his eye upon his hearers, or, better, St. Paul
would say, w^ith his hearers always in his heart;
otherwise he may produce a faultless essay, but
he will miss the true effect of preaching. In the
^ Photius, quoted by Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, p. 110.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 61

process of writing sermons, especially, this maxim
needs to be remembered. The absent hearers must
be pictured, felt, addressed, as present, actually-
present before the eyes, as the early critic said of
Chrysostom. This power of realizing the presence
of others in the solitude of thought, and, hence, of
speaking or writing as if conscious of the listening
ear and the interested, responsive eye ; this power
varies widely in the measure of native endowment.
You feel it in a marked degree in the best of letter
writers, like William Cowper. But the poorest
native gift may be cultivated almost beyond belief,
and, like other kinds of imagination, this should be
developed and trained for the preacher's special
purpose. Such training comes more readily, of
course, when the preacher has a congregation of
his own, and when the faces he sees from week to
week before him become familiar by social inter-
course and expressive by reason of personal ac-
quaintance. But even from the irregular and scat-
tered opportunities which the student finds, he may
by patient effort call up and construct a congrega-
tion to people his study, and give life and reality
to his solitary thought. And from the very be-
ginning of. his ministry, the preacher should not
forget that his art began in friendly. Christian
conversation, and that the point, directness, and
personal interest of the early preachers are needed
still to clothe his words with power.

62 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

4. Christian preaching from the beginning
sought to instruct and edify the hearer. The
ofjuXia of Socrates was meant to teach and to en-
lighten his pupils. The exposition of the syna-
gogue unfolded and made more clear the truth of
Scripture. And from the first great sermon of St.
Peter in the Acts, to reach the conscience through
the mind and the heart has been the aim of Chris-
tian preaching. While the Christian Church and
fellowship gave motive and occasion for the preach-
er's words, while the common truth below their
united life made the basis of his witness, while the
tone in which he spoke was familiar and conver-
sational, there was always a higher point from
which the preacher addressed his hearers, and to-
ward which he strove to lift their thoughts and
their lives. Not a sermon in the Acts, not an
Epistle in the New Testament, forgets this twofold
purpose, or fails to find therein a basis for direct
appeal.

This twofold purpose, to instruct and to edify,
the preacher needs to bear in mind to-day. In
every sermon, whatever its special aim and end
may be, both elements should find their place.
Whether the church or the world be directly ad-
dressed, respect for the hearers demands them
both. Without them, all fervor of appeal is like
the crackling of thorns, a moment's blaze, but no

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 63

lasting heat. A just appeal, and no other has an
abiding force, must bear examination at the bar of
the hearer's mind, after the sound of the preacher's
voice has ceased. The earnest, honest effort to
instruct and edify, to make some truth more plain
and real, will alone endure that test.

But the preacher, it may be said, cannot always
speak from a higher point than his hearers have
gained. Their acquaintance both with the world
and with the Word of God may be wider than his ;
their experience may be larger and deeper. The
objection is specious, but not valid. Whatever the
preacher's limitation in years and personal expe-
rience, his training and preparation have given
him a certain advantage over his hearers : that ad-
vantage should be increased by every opportunity
for leisure and special study, for meditation and
prayer, and by constant practice in public teaching
and exposition.

For the mind, to borrow Lowell's favorite illus-
tration, like the dyer's hand, becomes subdued to
that in which it works. Let no man despise thy
youth, writes St. Paul to his younger brother in
the ministry, and that his teaching and conduct
might command the just respect of men, he adds
these counsels : " Be diligent in these things," Tama
fieXera; "give thyself wholly to them," ev tou'tois icr6i;

64 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

" that thy progress may be manifest unto all," iva

(Tov fj TrpoKOTrr) cjiavepa y Tracrti/.

These four primitive and fundamental elements
in preaching have been suggested by the history
and usage of the Greek words, homily and homi-
letics. Two Latin terms now claim attention, " ser-
mon " and " preaching." From these also, when
compared with their Greek equivalents, we may
gather other features in the primitive conception
of the preacher's mission and purpose.

Sermon, in the English and the French forms
alike, is an abbreviated accusative of the Latin
sermo. Sermo is of uncertain origin, although
generally derived more or less directly from sero,
to join, or bind together. The Roman derivation
Varro gives in these words : Sermo est a serie :
sermo enim non potest in uno homine solo, sed ubi
oratio cum altero conjuncta. Others would con-
nect the word rather with serta or conserta oratio,
laying the emphasis, not on the succession of
speakers, but upon the succession of ideas inter-
woven in the same speech. I mention these de-
tails, because, although the word was first used of
conversation, even in Boman usage, and still more
under Christian interpretation, sermo carried the
idea of consecutiveness, and hence of plan and
formal discourse. It was the Latin equivalent of
1 1 Timothy iv. 15.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 65

the Greek \6yo<s, which we have seen was used in
contrast to biiLXia, and which emphasized the idea
of reason, the logic of speech. The sermon is thus,
as Dr. Hatch suggests, the creation of rhetoric, of
Greek rhetoric : it implies synthesis as well as
analysis : it points to the time in which Christian
preaching had taken a studied form, and had be-
come already in the highest sense a science and an
art.

"Preaching" and "preach" have come to us
from the Latin through the medium of early
French, the nearer Saxon derivative predieian be-
ing thus supplanted. Praedicare, the Latin orig-
inal, means to cry out, to make public, to proclaim
before men. It suggests the herald's function, and
is of kindred meaning with the Greek Kripva-a-m.^
The latter is the most common word to describe
the preacher's work in the New Testament. Of the
other Greek words used of the same great office,
SiaXeyofwj. Suggests a reasoning or discussion, while

the common KaxayycWtu, the rare StayyeXXw, eiayyeXC^m

emphasize the relation of the messenger to the sen-
der, the latter revealing also the joyous character of
the message he bears. Through all these terms, the
Greek and the Latin, the command of the Master
to the first disciples finds an echo, " What I tell you
in the darkness, speak ye in the light : and what

1 St. Matthew x. 27.
5

66 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

ye hear in the ear, proclaim upon the housetops,"
KH/pv^aTe £7rt tZv So)iJia,T(ov.

From these words, then, from sermon and preach-
ing, we follow the primitive conception in further
detail, and remark again —

5. Christian preaching was early and naturally
developed into the systematic and logical discourse.
The simple story of the Master's life, told as we
find it in the Gospels, did not suffice even for the
age of the Apostles. Further development of the
fundamental truth was asked, the meaning of the
Master's words and mission, his living relation to
the earlier Kevelation and to the disciples who
should follow after Him. To meet such question-
ing and such needs the great Epistles were written,
the Ephesians and Colossians with their lofty vision
and majestic sweep, the Romans and the Hebrews
with their marshalling of prophetic evidence and
array of argument. And what the great Epistles
did for their readers the preacher must have done,
in his measure, for the same class of hearers also.
Nor is this all. These very Epistles were designed
in the first instance to be read in the gatherings of

' Preaching, ic^puj, was he that called the People together
on Publiok Business, in the Cities of Greece, and made Proc-
lamations in the Markets and all Publiok Places, with a loud
voice. Saxons called Bishops God's Bedels. Edwards,
Preacher, I. 182.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 67

the brethren, — they were written, that is, with the
eye upon the hearers, not the readers. With such
a purpose in view, the writers, who were also
preachers of the Word, neither would nor could
have adopted a distinctively written style : their
choice and their natural instinct alike would lead
them to keep closely to the manner of their public
address, to write as they spoke. Such a conclusion,
I think, borne out by the evidence of the writings
before us. The Epistle to the Hebrews, especially,
is oratory, and oratory of the highest type : it
speaks to the ear, not to the eye : it gains full
force only when it is delivered, like the Oration on
the Crown. Read aloud its varied and vigorous
Greek, and you may catch even now through bold
figure and striking imagery the sweep and move-
ment of sound as well as thought, and feel the
power and freedom of the practised speaker. The
Epistles of St. Paul, also, less stately and sustained,
are spoken words. With his eye upon his hearers,
the rude Galatian, the subtle Greek, the Roman
schooled to thoughts of power and law, he utters
his message, abrupt and broken, it may be, or in
firm set logic of his own, or in breathless flight ris-
ing through circle after circle of lofty thought. In
the other Epistles of the New Testament no less,
we may find echoes of the apostolic preaching. In
each Epistle, an individual element, the speech of

68 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

the writer, like St. Peter's Galilean accent, bewrays
him. St. John, with the few words so often re-
peated, clear, simple, yet profound, intense with
love that burns as well as brightens; St. James,
concise in utterance, weighty in meaning, strong,
severe, now rhythmic and sonorous, now like the
lightning swift and sudden, a master who unites
the pregnant, pointed brevity of Demosthenes with
the SetvoTijs of the Hebrew prophets ; St. Peter, dis-
tinctively the preacher among the Apostles, quick,
sensitive, and sympathetic, coining his words to
make an image striking in effect, a speaker by
native temperament and gift ; — we may see and
hear them all, while we study these few but pre-
cious pages, as they spoke among their brethren, or
to the wider circles of Jews and of Greeks around
the little Church. Nor can the preacher find a
better manual than these gathered writings afford,
to broaden his idea of the power and possibilities
of public speech.

The Epistles, then, disclose to us the methods to
which the writers were accustomed in their preach-
ing and public address. But, further, they teach
us, and the lesson is hardly less interesting or less
important, what the capacity and understanding of
their hearers must have been. These Epistles were
written, of course, with the expectation that they
would be understood as well as heard ; not by

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 69

every hearer, perhaps ; not by any one hearer, it
may be, thoroughly, at once, and in all parts ; but
in the general tenor of their teaching, and by the
gathered disciples as a whole. What trained intel-
ligence, such an understanding must have presup-
posed ! what ability both to follow lines of close-
knit argument, and to grasp at once great truths,
however profound or sublime ! Imagine the Ephe-
sians or the Colossians as just written, and read for
the first time in any Christian congregation in New
England to-day : how many hearers would gather
their meaning, or feel their impulse? how many
would grow restless, and wander in mind? how
few would ask that the same words be read again
in their hearing, that they might add to the truth
already discerned the truth that still lay beyond
their understanding ?

It is not, it is true, the mind alone that must
have been trained for such intelligent hearing ; it
is the heart that needed most and first especial cul-
ture ; and the interest once awakened, intelligence
is rapidly and by that very fact developed. The
early Christians came chiefly from the humbler
walks of life ; few of them, if any, had shared the
training of schools and philosophies. But the faith
they now embraced was itself an educative force, a
discipline of thought as well as of feeling. It grew
out of the older Scriptures, and for its justification

70 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

those Scriptures must be searched and compared ;
it was built upon a revealed, creative Word, and
that Word must be examined and understood. The
believer was exhorted to be ready always to give
answer to every man that asked him a reason con-
cerning the hope that was in him. All this would
stimulate and quicken thought, and make the newly
awakened spirit eager to seek and ready to take
the teaching of apostles and preachers. The intel-
lectual movement among the people, despised by
rabbis and philosophers alike, must be taken into
account if we would appreciate the spiritual move-
ment. The training and discipline of disciples
were not forgotten in the effort to win converts ;
the kingdom was not extended widely alone, it was
built upon deep foundations of intelligent under-
standing.

We do not need, then, to go beyond the first
century, to find the beginnings of systematic and
logical discourse in the Christian communities.
The development of the third and fourth centu-
ries, the glorious outburst of eloquence which is
linked with the names of Chrysostom and of the
clover-leaf of Cappadocia, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa,
and Gregory Nazianzen, was the result of Greek
rhetoric fused by Christian fervor. But the first
century marks the beginning of the highest type of
preaching; the Alexandrine ApoUos, avrjp Xoytos,^
1 Acts xviii. 24.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 71

is linked with its first tradition, and the great
Epistles are living witnesses to its early develop-
ment. The sermon of to-day is not more unlike
the primitive homily than the great Epistles, the
Romans and the Hebrews, are unlike the simple
story of the Gospels on the one hand, and the
preaching of the prophets on the other. The ser-
mon, then, whatever its abuses may have been, is
the natural and just outgrowth of a faith which
builds upon the Word ; it is not a proof of deca-
dence, but of normal and necessary development.

6. The Christian preacher was from the begin-
ning, and is still, the personal messenger of Jesus
Christ ; his message was then, and still is, a Gospel
of joy and hope. I have put these two thoughts
together, because they cannot rightly be separated ;
the second follows the first, the first explains the
second. Out of his relation to his Master the
preacher's authority must come ; out of the nature
of his message the joy and hope of his work must
spring. Only as he holds both features firmly in
mind and heart, can he find power and grace to
win men and hold them in the service of his Mas-
ter. " We are ambassadors on behalf of Christ,"
writes St. Paul, and no apostle felt more deeply
either the dignity or the devotion demanded by his
task, 'Yirlp Xpia-Tov ovv jrpea/Sevo/xev ; mark the loftiness
of his tone, " as though God were entreating by us,"

72 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

0)5 Tov 6eov TrapaKa\ovvTO% 8l' rjfjuav ; " we beseech you

on behalf of Christ," Seo/xe^a virlp Xpia-Tov,^ how ten-
der the words ! " As the Father hath sent me, even
so send I you," runs the charter of the Twelve.
And as Christ sent before His face the seventy dis-
ciples into every place whither He Himself would
come, so now He sends each messenger, each min-
ister, in His place and on His own divine errand.
No higher authority than this can be asked ; no
lower authority would be sufficient for the preach-
er's special work.

The pulpit is not a platform ; the preacher is not
a lecturer then. The truth he brings must approve
itself to reason, but it does not begin with reason.
He speaks for another, who speaks through him.
He presses on to apprehend that for which he was
apprehended by Christ Jesus, el koI KaraXd^o) e^' <S
Ktti KaTe\-i^<l>6r]v vtto XptcrroS 'IiycroC His whole per-
sonality is taken into the possession of a higher, a
divine Person, and sent forth thence with a clear,
divine message. The conviction of such a posses-
sion and message is his power.

The preacher's task, then, is prophetic; he is
linked in no merely fanciful way with the prophets
who went before him. His circumstances differ
widely from theirs, but his spirit has a kindred
quality, for he too is sent to speak for God to men.
1 2 Cor. V. 20. 2 Philip, iii. 12.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 73

The rough garment and leathern girdle are the
accidents of the prophet's calling, not its essentials.
And among the prophets what diversity in incident
and circumstance! If the remoter figures seem
very far away, the nearer prophets have points of
contact and kinship. If even Elijah was a man
of like passions with us, of like nature, that is,
bfioLoiradrj's rifuv, Jeremiah is a man of like per-
plexities with us also. And it is significant that
the life most fully drawn of all in the Old Testa-
ment is precisely his who comes nearest to our-
selves, both in the common daylight of his outward
career, unmixed with miracle, with no strange su-
pernatural glamour, and also in the varied trials
and sensitive temper of the life within. For Jere-
miah shared with us, —

" those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized; " ^

and yet Jeremiah too was a prophet, and a prince
of prophets. And to his age, as to ours, Jeremiah
could speak with more strength and effectiveness
than Elijah. To-day also the Word of the Lord
comes home with 'nearest helpfulness, not through
the positiveness of universal because unthinking
* Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality.

74 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

dogmatism, untouched by life around us, but
through hearts, sensitive to the doubt and ques-
tion of our age, that yet have found a divine Pres-
ence and leading clear and sufficient for their own
and hence for others' needs. Such a heart alone
has the authority Epictetus felt in the Stoic sage :
" He used to talk in such a way that each individual
one of us who sat there thought some one had been
telling Ruf us about him ; he so put his finger upon
what we had done, he so set the individual faults
of each one of us clearly before our eyes." ^ Such a
heart, above all, commands confidence by the higher
Power that speaks through his own lips and expe-
rience, as through Tennyson's teacher and friend :

" He fought his doubts and gathered strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them : thus he came at length

" To find a stronger faith his own :

And Power was with him in the night.
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone,

" But in the darkness and the cloud." ^

On the other hand, the preacher's message is
always one of joy and hope. It was such from the
beginning ; it is such to-day. No book reveals the
1 Epictetus, p. 269. ^ In Memoriam, xcvi.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 75

dark and serious side of human life with the abso-
lute clearness, the faithful, undisguised reality, of
the New Testament ; the opening chapters of the
Eomans are lurid with pictures of sin, and guilt,
and misery; the fifth and eighth chapters of St.
John's Gospel probe the human conscience to its
depths. Yet no book is so filled with courage and
hope as the New Testament. The Master, through
all disheartening circumstance, has His own eyes,
and those of His disciples, fixed on Satan fallen as
lightning from heaven ; he sees, and teaches them
to see, in every phase of sin and suffering a call to
work the works of God; the very cross is exulta-
tion unto Him. In the sombre chapters of the
Romans even, St. Paul burns with desire to carry
his Gospel to Rome, assured that there also it will
prove the power of God unto salvation. And the
necessity, di/ayK?;, laid upon him in the Corinthians,-'
" woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel," draws
its force from the gladness of his message; it is
like the feeling of the lepers in the deserted camp
of the Syrians : ^ " this day is a day of good tidings,
and we hold our peace ; we do not well." The glo-
rious Gospel in his charge he must give to all the
world.

No other spirit befits the preacher to-day ; and
at this point his task is brighter and more blessed
1 1 Cor. ix. 16. 2 2 Kings vii. 9.

76 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

than that of Jeremiah and of his fellow prophets.
Their burden was often of judgment alone, of judg-
ment unrelieved by hope ; a dark, foreboding
cloud hangs above their ministry: it is, as St.
Paul said of the Mosaic law, a ministration of
death. But the Christian preacher's message is
always of life : all else in his preaching is subordi-
nate, incidental, to this ; the darkest circumstances
he views, and sets, in this relief. What a differ-
ence this involves in the whole color and impres-
sion of his message may be illustrated from an-
other field of thought. A few years ago, there ap-
peared two novels dealing with kindred subjects,
and with a kindred purpose to be served : " The
Nether World," by George Gissing, "All Sorts
and Conditions of Men," by Walter Besant. Both
moved in the lower strata of London ; both were
the result of long and faithful observation, and
both were pronounced by competent judges trust-
worthy in detail. But the effect produced upon
the reader was most diverse : one left him in de-
spondent mood, by the very hopelessness of the
state of things portrayed ; the other, although
no less sombre in its picture of the present,
left the heart still buoyant with the possibilities-
already disclosed, and inspired with desire to help
towards the realization of a better future. The
difference lay in the point of view, the dominant,

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 77

controlling thought. One dwelt on the darker,
discouraging aspects of the present, the present
death ; the other looked through these, and empha-
sized the cheer, the hope, the creative power, of
life. There are preachers, it must be admitted,
with whom the emphasis lies on the darker side,
whose thought and teaching, not by incidence but
by direction, savor most of death and unto death.
Their choice of themes, their treatment of every
theme indeed, the hearer feels depressing, dis-
heartening ; but such is not the preaching of the
Gospel, as the Apostles conceived it, as the Master
designed it, as the very word, evayyeXi^w, implies.
No sermon is really successful, no sermon fulfils
the purpose of preaching, if it leaves any hearer
either satisfied with himself, or discouraged and
hopeless for the future. Each sermon should make
every hearer feel : I ought to be better than I am ;
I may be better than I am ; and, by the grace of
God, I will be better than I am. Every preacher
may well ask himself, before and after each ser-
mon: Will my words produce, have my words
produced, to-day this twofold effect, on all, on
each, of my hearers ? If not, where does my fail-
ure lie ? Too little truth on the one hand, too little
love on the other, will explain the defect. aX-qOeveiv
iv oydTrrj must be his motto.

St. Francis de Sales, we are told, used to make

78 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

a long pause before beginning bis sermon, moving
bis eyes slowly over all his congregation. A canon
noticed this one day, and asked St. Francis the
reason. The great preacher answered : " I salute
the guardian angels of all my hearers, and I ask
each one of them to prepare for my words the
heart he has in charge. I have gained the great-
est blessings by this practice." ^ Such prayer
and vision might well prove inspiring ; but what
deeper earnestness and power should clothe his
words who feels behind each hearer the loving
presence of his Master, and who speaks his mes-
sage as Christ's ambassador in the very hearing of
his Lord ! In Florence, there is a fresco by Andrea
del Sarto, which represents the Baptist preach-
ing by the Jordan. You see the crowds that sit
and stand before him, hanging upon his word, and
drinking in his message : you almost feel the truth
that falls from his impassioned lips. But the secret
of his power lies beyond the hearers' vision. In the
far background your eyes and the preacher's also
behold a kneeling figure, pleading for preacher
and for his hearers also. In the consciousness of
that greater Presence the Baptist found his power ;
in the same consciousness the preacher of to-day
must speak, if he would realize the true end of
preaching.

1 St. Francois de Sales, Modele, 225. ,

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.
II.

Relation of Homiletics to Logic, Rhetoric, and Eloquence.

HoMiLETics, we have seen, is both an art and a
science. Christian preaching, which forms its sub-
ject, has its roots in the Church, the Christian so-
ciety ; moves in the broad circle of distinctive
Christian truths ; is set in a conversational key ;
seeks to instruct and to edify; is early devel-
oped into systematic and logical discourse. The
Christian preacher is the personal messenger of
Jesus Christ; his message is therefore in its es-
sence a Gospel of hope and joy.

Now the higher an art is in its nature and its
product, the more does its perfection depend upon
the skill and training gained from other allied and
subordinate arts. The nobler and more complex a
science is, the more does its mastery demand a
thorough knowledge of other allied or subordinate
sciences. Before the painter can work out his own
conceptions with the large freedom of genius, be-
fore he can achieve distinction in his chosen field.

80 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

he must gain both the knowledge of detail and
practical skill, the training of eye and of hand, to
follow and obey the motions of imagination and of
will. And if he turn to landscape, or still life, or
the human face and form, how much of minuter
knowledge in his special sphere must be added to
general truths of color and of tone ! Before the
astronomer can devote himself undisturbed to his
sublime science, what large and varied knowledge
he must lay under tribute, and from how many
special sources must that knowledge be drawn !
Mathematics, chemistry, physics, with their mani-
fold divisions, each in turn, must be mastered be-
fore he can measure the movement, determine the
substance, weight, and mutual relations, and ana-
lyze the spectra of sun and of star.

Both as a science, then, and as an art, how sub-
tle and how complex is the preacher's task, how
high in its aim, how broad in its scope ! He has
the most delicate and difficult of problems to meet,
and of products to create. He must work convic-
tion of necessary but often unwelcome truths : he
must overcome the twofold resistance of native in-
ertia and sinful habit : he must make the unseen
stand out clearer and more powerful than the seen ;
the eternal outweigh the dominant and absorbing
interest of the temporal : he must sway the feel-
ings, convince the reason, quicken the conscience.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 81

and move the will. And all this he must do with
all men and with each man. For such a task what
large and varied knowledge is needed ; how wide
and deep an acquaintance with human life, in its
outward circumstance, and in its inward motives ;
what close and faithful study of

" All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame ! " ^

As an art, then, homiletics is related to other
arts ; as a science, it is built upon other sciences ;
and these relations, these broader, deeper bases,
must be first considered, if we would understand
both the scope and the method of the preacher's
work. These special studies, kindred and fun-
damental, may be arranged in two groups, the
formal and the material: those studies, on the
one hand, which cover the general laws of human
speech, the science of thought, the arts of expres-
sion and persuasion ; and those studies, on the other
hand, which develop the subjects with which the
preacher deals, the whole range of theological re-
search, and, especially, the science of Biblical in-
terpretation. The relation of homiletics to each of
these groups must now claim our attention ; and
with the first group, the arts of form and expres-
sion, it is natural to begin.

1 Coleridge, Love.
6

82 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

A concise and masterly volume on forensic ora-
tory was published a few months ago by a profes-
sor of law in Yale University. It is designed to be
a manual for advocates, as the title-page affirms ; '
but the whole of the first part, and the second,
third, and fourth books of the second part, are
as applicable to the pulpit as to the bar ; and the
whole volume will amply repay the preacher's clos-
est study. Two sentences from Professor Robin-
son's preface I quote as bearing upon the point we
have now reached. " Seeking for the method in
which a legal contest ought to be conducted," he
writes, " I was led to compare the mode of opera-
tion adopted by advocates who had become noted
for the celerity and certainty with which they won
their cases, with the method and the rules pre-
scribed by writers on the Art of Forensic Oratory,
especially by Cicero and Quintilian, and became
satisfied that, whether consciously to themselves
or not, these advocates pursued that method and
obeyed those rules." And, again, after defining
the purpose of his treatise, he adds : " The study
of Logic, Rhetoric, and Elocution, on a far more
extensive scale than the limits of this volume per-
mit, I must strenuously recommend. Nor is there
a work on Advocacy or on any one of its subordi-
nate topics, nor any book of Trials, nor any able
novel, in which the operations of skillful advocates

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 83

and detectives are described, that he {i. e., the
student) may not profitably read as illustrating
and applying the rules and methods which this
manual inculcates and explains." Not less broad
and comprehensive is the survey which the preach-
er's art demands along the kindred lines of logic
and rhetoric, of oratory and literature. Not less
varied and manifold are the sources from which he
may draw his power to kindle, to convince, and to
persuade. And not less certain and rigorous are
the rules which, whether consciously to himself or
not, the preacher must observe, if he would reach
the highest results. We must examine, therefore,
the relation of the preacher's art to the different
members of this first group of studies.

1. The preacher should be familiar with the
broad principles of logic, both deductive and in-
ductive; the latter, indeed, however its claim to
a coordinate place with the former may be disputed,
is not less important to the thinker and speaker to-
day. The broad principles, I said : for the minute
details and mechanism of the art it is of course
unnecessary to keep in mind. The multitude of
moods and figures in the syllogism, together with
the barbarous jargon devised to distinguish valid
forms, he may forget with little loss ; the list of
formal and material fallacies may not remain fresh
and by name in his recollection ; but the practical

84 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

discipline he gathers from the study, and the ex-
amination he learns to make of specious and seduc-
tive statements will never lose their usefulness.
Occasional reference to such books as the Elemen-
tary Lessons of Jevons and the recent volume of
the late Professor Minto will not be without ser-
vice, as a gymnastic for the mind, imparting facil-
ity and keenness to the powers of discrimination.
The latter volume may be commended also for its
constant application of the principles of logic to
the discovery of current fallacies in popular speech
and observation.

The art of logic grew out of dialectic : it was
devised and developed by Aristotle to meet the
needs and dangers of conversation as a means of
instruction and discipline. As homiletics has an
origin akin to dialectic, logic has here also a kin-
dred use. The danger in dialectic was that a skil-
ful questioner would take the conversation entirely
into his own hands, and carry the other parties
wherever he would, misled by their answers of yes
and no, into positions inconsistent or untenable.
Where all interlocutors are silent, as is the case
during discourse from the pulpit, there is the
. strongest reason for the speaker to examine care-
fully his statements and arguments. The preacher
has no one to answer him, it is often said, hence he
falls into habits of loose and inconsequent reason-

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 85

ing, such as the lawyer would find impossible, with
the insight and trained intelligence of the judge
above him, and the keen eye of the opposing coun-
sel to detect and uncover his fallacies. But if he
has no opponent to speak in his turn and correct
his errors, the preacher's hearers are a jury in per-
petual session, each member of which can examine
his arguments at leisure, and test and weigh their
worth. Such a jury is more to be respected and
more to be feared than a jury that sits for the oc-
casion only, decides the case at once, and straight-
way dismisses the pleader and his cause from mind.
Hence, the preacher's interests, no less than his
honesty and his honor, demand the patient search-
ing of each hidden premise and conclusion.
Warmth of feeling, brilliant imagination, and the
glow of speech are a poor excuse for statement
and reasoning that compromise the candor or the
intelligence of the preacher in the minds of his
wiser hearers. The evil such preachers do lives
after them ; and the distrust they create has un-
happily a wider reach than appears upon the sur-
face: they discredit the Gospel they preach, and
loosen its hold on thoughtful men. It is a part of
a pastor's painful experience to find in his parish
men of clear and candid minds who have been re-
pelled from Christian fellowship and thinking by
preachers of this character.

86 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

These evils, it is true, are seldom the result of
deliberate purpose. Ministers are not mounte-
banks, or sophists, dishonest jugglers with words
or thoughts. The difficulty grows out of a habit
of speaking without patience and study, through
indolence or lack of training or self-deceit. The
inner sophist, it has been well said, is our most
dangerous enemy. Men generally deceive them-
selves before they deceive others. But it is the
function of logic to set free from inward errors,
as well as from misleading voices without ; to an-
swer and expose the sophist in our hearts, as well
as the false teachers who disguise the wolf beneath
the sheep's clothing. The illusions to which we
are all subject, preachers as well as other men, are
fourfold in nature and origin, as Francis Bacon
has taught us. There are illusions of the tribe or
the race, which we share with all mankind, which
belong to our common humanity ; illusions of the
cave, which belong to our individual tempera-
ment and point of view ; illusions of the market-
place, which come from conversation and the vul-
gar prejudice around us ; and illusions of the stage,
which dazzle our eyes by the splendor of great
names and the fair show of authority. From all
these four we need to be delivered. And the idols
of the cave and the tribe, no less than the idols of
the market and the stage, inexorable logic, the

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 87

iconoclast, labors to break in pieces and destroy.
To clear his own mind of illusion and self-deceit,
and to make his teaching commend itself to his
hearers as candid, intelligent, and just, the preacher
should seek the aid of logic. In the conflict with
error and ignorance, homiletics has need of this
strong, trustworthy, and mail-clad ally.

2. The preacher should be a master of the prin-
ciples and of the methods of rhetoric. The origin
of this art is highly suggestive. It grew up at Syr-
acuse after the overthrow of Thrasybulus, b. c. 466,
and the establishment of popular government in Si-
cily. Democratic exiles, who had been dispossessed
by the tyrants, put forward their earlier claims
to lands and other property. In the nature of the
case, little direct and documentary evidence could
be adduced, argument proceeded chiefly by infer-
ence, and a multitude of details had to be set in a
natural and effective order. To meet these needs,
the new art took its rise, " primarily intended to
help the plain citizen who had to speak before a
court of law." ^ The founder, Corax, laid down
rules for arrangement and divided the speech into
four parts : the proem, or introduction ; the narra-
tive, or statement ; the arguments, aySves ; the
subsidiary remarks, TrapeK^aa-K ; and the peroration.
He further brought forward and illustrated the
1 Cf. Encyd. Brit. Rhet. K. C. Jebb.

88 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

place and use of probability, cko's, and pointed out
the fallacy of confounding its abstract and particu-
lar forms. Persuasion, then, was the purpose of
rhetoric from its very beginning ; and such is its
function still. Through all its diverse methods,
this common purpose runs and reigns. To this
end all faculties of the mind are addressed in
turn.

Rhetoric may be defined, then, as Dr. Campbell
defines eloquence, as " that art or talent (jixv-^ or
Svva/ui) by which the discourse is adapted to its
end." Quintilian's definition is to the same effect :
Dicere secundum virtutem orationis, scientia bene
dicendi. But the dictum of Francis Bacon, al-
though weighty, is too narrow. "The duty and
office of Rhetoric," he writes, " is to apply Reason
to Imagination for the better moving of the will ; "
the relation of rhetoric to the feelings, you notice,
is here passed over, — a serious omission. What,
then, is the end of discourse, to which rhetoric is
directed? The ends of speaking. Dr. Campbell
tells us, are four : " every speech being intended to
enlighten the understanding, to please the imagina-
tion, to move the passions, or to influence the will."
But with speech of the more serious kind, with
speech as it falls within our province especially,
there is but one real end, the last of the four,
" to influence the will ; " the other three are not

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 89

coordinate, but subordinate and subsidiary to this.
Cicero combines these three under two heads and
makes both lead up to the great end : Optimus est
orator qui dicendo animos audientium et docet et
delectat et permovet.

But the finest distinction between Logic and
Ehetoric, and by far the most striking definition
of Rhetoric also, is ascribed by Cicero and by Sex-
tus Empiricus to Zeno the Stoic. Logic he likens
to the clenched fist; rhetoric to the open hand.
Each writer adds the explanation which Zeno gave
to his own figure, and I therefore transcribe the
language of both. Zenonis est, inquam, hoc Stoici,
— writes Cicero, — omnem vim loquendi, ut jam
ante Aristoteles, in duas tributam esse partes : RTie-
toricam, palmce ; Dialecticam, pugni similem esse
dicebat, quod latius loquerentur rhetores, dialectici
autum compressius.^ The figure was a favorite with
Zeno, and he used it also to describe the successive
degrees or modes of apprehending truth, visus as-
sensus, comprehensio, scientia, being denoted by
the compression of the hand in different degrees.
^t hoc quidem Zeno gestu conficiebat. Nam quum
extensis digitis adversam, manum ostenderat, visum
inquiebat hvQusmodi est. Deinde quum paullum
digitos constrinxerat, assensus hujusmodi. Turn
quum plane compresserat pugmimque fecerat, com-
1 Cie. De Fin. ii. 6, 17.

90 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

prehensionem illam esse dicebat. Qua ex similitvr
dine etiam nomen ei rei, quod ante non fuerat,
KardXrjij/iv imposuit. Quum antem Icevam manum
admoverat, et ilium pugnum arete vehementerque
compresserat, scientiam talem esse dicebat?- The
explanation is given by Sextus in flowing Greek :

ZrjVOiV o KiTTCvs Ipuyr-qBw OTO) Bia<j>epei SiaXeKTiKrj prp-op-
tKiJs, av(rTpi\j/ai t7]v X^P"' "'"' ToA.ir i^airXoMras £<^'7)
TOVTo>, Kara. p.kv t^v (rvarrpocfjrjv to (rrpoyyvXav Kai jBpaxv
T^S StaXcKTlK-^S Ta-TTOiV tScoD/Att, Stct Sc T^s l^airXuKTcuK Koi
iKTacrecas tSiv haKTvXiav to irXaTv ttJs prjTopiKTJi Suya/ACMS
alviTToiieyo^. The clcnched fist and the open hand !
The difference, it will be seen, goes deeper than the
style, the language alone : it affects the whole man-
ner of address, and the very spirit of the speaker
as he approaches his hearers. The clenched fist
means compulsion, and compulsion, whether physi-
cal or intellectual, always creates repugnance to-
ward opinions, and antagonism toward persons.
Such a speaker, even when he carries conviction,
loses the fairest fruit of victory : he leaves resent-
ment rankling in the breast of the vanquished. In
Butler's often misquoted lines, —

" He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still ;
Which he may adhere to, yet disown,
For reasons to himself best known."

1 Cic. Acad. Pr. ii. 47, 146.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 91

Logic alone, at its best, can only smite down, and
overpower ; it cannot win. But the open, friendly
hand of rhetoric means persuasion : it invites, al-
lures, and welcomes ; it makes a smoother, easier
path toward conviction, and when conviction is
gained adds the interest of pleasure and delight
to the movement of the will. The old fable of the
sun and the wind, each striving in turn to make
the traveller open or lay aside his cloak, points to
the same difference in method. In our day at
least, and especially among preachers, this differ-
ence should be carefully borne in mind ; the meas-
ure of usefulness will depend in large degree upon
clear discernment of the signs of the times at this
point. No age, perhaps, has been so impatient of
all dictation as our own, none more sensitive to
the slightest outward assertion or assumption of
authority : it cannot be driven, it must be drawn ;
but none surely has been so open to persuasion, so
ready to lend a respectful hearing to words that
are both reasonable and courteous. By such words
alone can real conviction, deep and lasting, be won.
He who adopts the oracular, authoritative, dictato-
rial air, when he rises before an audience, fails to
move intelligent men ; he may flog his hearers with
words, if they are schoolboys in mind, but after
they have outgrown the rod, and put away childish
thoughts and things, his method wiU no longer
serve.

92 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

Homiletics, then, is not a mere branch, or spe-
cies, of rhetoric, as it has sometimes been called ;
such a definition is too narrow. But rhetoric is a
fundamental and important element in the preach-
er's work. Homiletics, upon one side at least, is
rhetoric with a special purpose to govern its appli-
cation, and direct its use. A wide and thorough
knowledge of the elements and properties of style,
of purity in diction, of clearness, force, and ele-
gance in the choice of words, of just arrangement
in marshalling and massing ideas, of the power of
apt and striking figures to illumine and enliven
thought, with whatever else adds charm and color,
effect and impressiveness, to human speech, — all
this, it is the function of rhetoric to impart. All
the subtle but legitimate methods men may take to
enlighten the understanding, to quicken the im-
agination, to stir the feelings, and thus to move
the will, of their fellow-men, should be covered by
the preacher's training. The means that others
all around him use for narrow, selfish, worldly ends,
he must learn to use, with no less diligence and
patience surely, for the larger, holier, unworldly
ends of his ministry. In this respect at least, the
children of this world must not be wiser in their
generation than the children of light.

3. The preacher must study the masters of pub-
lic speech, both the living and the dead, in other

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 93

tongues and in other callings, and in his own. Elo-
quence is rhetoric applied, illustrated, informed
with life. Brevissima via per exempla, example
is better than precept, as the Latin adage teaches
us, because it is at once clearer, easier, and more
persuasive. Its effects are gained In large meas-
ure, not through actual and deliberate copying,
but through unconscious and continual imitation.
Habits of speech and the formation of style, espe-
cially, are subject to these subtle and unconscious
influences. In these directions we are all affected,
slowly and insensibly, but deeply, permanently,
and from our earliest intelligence, by the strength
of our associations. The child takes his language,
his words and his idiom alike, from the servants in
the house, and later from the children on the play-
ground and in the streets, far more than from the
teaching in the schools. There are few public
speakers who do not at times, by word or phrase, in
meaning or in pronunciation, betray the effect of
these early surroundings. It is significant from
the intellectual no less than from the spiritual
point of view that the great preachers of the early
Church, Basil and the Gregories, Chrysostom and
Augustine, were all trained from infancy by careful
and gifted mothers.

In later and more reflective years also, these sub-
tle, unconscious influences have an importance not

94 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

to be overlooked. We are all subject to the daily
and demoralizing effect of popular usage. The
newspaper is the channel through which whatever
is low and coarse, meaningless and indiscriminate,
barren and brutal, in the language of the streets,
finds its way into our homes and into our minds.
But the newspaper cannot be escaped; we must
read it in part at least. With all its defects, in
manners and in morals, and despite its evident and
growing deterioration, it has become a necessity to
him who would follow the course of events and
know what thoughts are in the minds of his fellow-
men to-day. Like the physician, the preacher can-
not flee from contagion, and his only safety lies
in recognizing his danger, and taking precautions
against the insidiousness o£ disease.

On the other hand, the preacher is beset as a
student by an opposite danger. Other languages
besides his own, especially the German, he must
use for purposes of study and research. And this
necessity, where matter counts for everything and
manner for nothing, tends to make him oblivious
to differences of idiom and usage, and insensible
to the finer qualities of his native tongue, and pro-
duces that careless or pedantic, but always awk-
ward and hybrid style, which disfigures so many
of our books and magazines of the higher class.
This subtle influence, also, the speaker must not
overlook.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 95

Neither of these dangers can be met by direct
attack. Both must be approached and turned
aside by indirection. Another set of influences,
as subtle, as gradual, as pervasive, must be brought
in play, if evil is to be overcome with good. And
for this purpose, the direct and diligent study of
form and expression needs to be supplemented by
that unconscious influence which comes from inti-
mate and daily familiarity with the acknowledged
masterpieces of thought and language. To walk
with the wise, the proverb tells us, is to gather
something of their wisdom. And to find and feel
for ourselves the charm of fitting and eloquent
speech is to cultivate a wholesome distaste for all
that is coarse and commonplace, crude and unfin-
ished in expression ; it is to imitate, almost uncon-
sciously, the manner of those with whom we thus
associate, to take delight ourselves in what Lowell
calls " the habitual full dress of the well - bred
mind." , Or, to change the figure and carry out the
comparison already used, great thoughts expressed
in choice and memorable words, familiar by fre-
quent repetition, will penetrate and fill the mind,
and serve as a prophylactic against the contagion
of popular and of pedantic speech, against hybrid
English and the English of the newspapers.

But these results, it may be said, will follow
from familiarity with any pure and classic English,

96 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

with speech or essay, with poetry or prose. There
are other advantages, however, which the speaker
can gain only from the study of speech in its varied
forms. Every one has noticed and felt the differ-
ence between the spoken and the written style,
although few, it may be, could define the differ-
ence, or tell in what it consists. For the public
speaker, it is most important that this difference be
carefully analyzed and thoroughly understood.

The written style, then, addresses the mind
through the eye alone: the impression which it
seeks to produce, and upon which it relies, may be
formed slowly and at leisure, and renewed, cor-
rected, repeated, and enlarged whenever the reader
desires. There is room, therefore, for delicate and
subtle thought, — for thought that requires time
and patient effort before it can be grasped in fuU.
Such qualities, indeed, if only a fair meaning be
apparent at the outset, allure the reader, and lead
him back to frequent study and to ever new de-
light : they give to prose a part of the depth and
charm of poetry. The construction, also, may be
complex and intricate: the eye takes in all the
clauses of a sentence at a single glance, and readily
discerns the relation of one to another, of each
to the whole. Abrupt and sudden changes are
avoided, softened down, or smoothed away ; con-
nectives are frequent and varied, imbedded often

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 97

within the clause, not standing at its beginning ;
transitions are uniformly made as gentle and grad-
ual as possible. Such is written style at its high-
est and its best, as the masters of literature, from
Plato downward, have used it.

The spoken style, on the other hand, reaches the
mind through the ear, and, so far as words are
concerned, through the ear alone. The play of
thought and feeling across the speaker's face, the
light and glow and life that pass from his eyes to
the eyes and hearts of his hearers, all these give
expression and emphasis, but they cannot give dis-
tinctness, definiteness, to his utterance ; his thought
can only become intelligible through his words, his
words through the ear alone. The impression
which he seeks to produce, and upon which alone
he can rely, must be made d'un seul jet, as a
whole and in all its parts at once. It cannot be
retouched, corrected, enlarged ; it can be repeated
and renewed only by the imperfect and uncertain
aid of memory. The thought to be expressed,
then, must be given forth with strength and mass :
it must stand out in firm lines and bold relief. It
may be profound, suggestive, far reaching : it must
not be too delicate, over subtle, fine drawn. Con-
structions, also, must be simple, straightforward,
easy to grasp. Long sentences may take their
turn with the short, but the longest must not be
7

98 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

complex or involved, but composed of parts dis-
tinctly articulated and connected in natural order ;
each sentence so plain, in fact, that wayfaring
men, though fools, shall not err therein. Transi-
tions should be obvious ; successive points must be
made sharp and striking : truths that are meant
to be held in memory must be enforced by repeti-
tion, or recapitulated in other words. Such is the
spoken style, at its highest and its best, as the
masters of assemblies have used it from Demos-
thenes downward. It differs from the written
style at every turn, but all these differences fall
under three particulars, — directness, point, and
force.

Now the preacher is a public speaker, and as
such his style should be the spoken style. Differ-
ent methods of delivery are not under our present
consideration : the emphasis lies here upon the
effect which the sermon should produce ; whether
it be read, or recited, or uttered without notes, the
style should be the same. He who writes his ser-
mons has greater need to cultivate this spoken
quality than he who speaks. But the preacher's
studies make him familiar chiefly with the written
style : the books he reads both in his special de-
partment and in general literature are all of this
class : his own style is from day to day insensibly
framed after these models. To counteract, then.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 99

or better, to supplement, this influence, he should
study the masters of public speech. If he is famil-
iar with other languages, whether classic or mod-
ern tongues, he will find it an advantage to read
the best of orators aloud to train his ear, and then
to put their thought in English words, gaining
thereby facility and fitness in speech. In Greek,
let him dwell upon Demosthenes, until he feels the
orator's variety and fineness and force, in the lim-
pid clearness of narration, in point and brevity of
reasoning, in close persuasiveness of appeal. Then
let him try to reproduce the same effects in terse
and vigorous and varied English. The Oration on
the Crown he read at college, at sundry times and
in divers manners, cut up in daily portions : now let
him master the great oration as a whole, that he
may f oUow its movement, feel its passion, and catch
its tone. The time it takes, the labor it costs, are
both well spent ; no written words make clearer the
secret of the spoken style.

Among the masters of modern speech, France
offers her orators of the Revolution, each charac-
terized by Castelar in striking figure:^ "Mira-
beau, la tempestad de ideas ; Vergniaud, la melo-
dia de la palabra ; Danton, el fuego, la ardiente
lava del espiritu; Camilo, el inmortal Camilo,
eterno, sublime nino escapado de Atenas, con cin-
1 JDiscursos Parliamentairos, iii. 127.

100 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

eel en vez de pluma, especie de bajo relieve del
Partenon, viviente, animado." Spain points to
Castelar himself, somewhat florid to our northern
taste, but rich in historic allusion and political
insight, and eloquent with the mingled majesty
and music of the Castilian tongue. " I never lack
for a word, — Pitt never lacks for the word," is
the discriminating tribute ascribed to Pitt's older
rival. Fox. The secret of Pitt's happier choice of
words, as ready but more exact, lies in large meas-
ure in his early habit of translation from the clas-
sics. There was scarcely a Greek or Latin classi-
cal writer of any eminence, his tutor tells us, the
whole of whose works Pitt had not read before
the age of twenty. " His mode of translating the
classics to his tutor," writes a biographer, "was a
peculiar one. He did not construe an author in
the ordinary way, but after reading a passage of
some length in the original, he turned it at once
into regular English sentences, aiming to give the
ideas with great exactness, and to express himself
at the same time with idiomatic accuracy and ease.
Such a course was admirably adapted to the for-
mation of an English style, distinguished at once
for copiousness, force, and elegance. To this early
training Mr. Pitt always ascribed his extraordinary
command of language, which enabled him to give
every idea its most felicitous expression, and to

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 101

pour out an unbroken stream of thought, hour
after hour, without once hesitating for a word, or
recalling a phrase, or sinking for a moment into
looseness or inaccuracy in the structure of his sen-
tences." ^ This single instance, this long but per-
tinent quotation, must suffice upon this point. But
it would be easy to multiply instances to show how
large a place the practice of translation has had in
the training of skilful speakers, from Cicero, who
followed the Grreek orators with close and constant
study, to Lord Mansfield, who confesses that while
a student at Oxford he rendered all the orations of
Cicero into written English, and then, after an in-
terval, retranslated his English into Latin. Some
other language than his own, either classic or mod-
ern, almost every student of to-day has learned ;
there is no reason then why he should not tnake
this knowledge tributary to his training as a
speaker, with the light of example before him.

If the English language, however, confines the
preacher's choice, how wide a field still opens be-
fore him from which he may select ! No modern
tongue contains so rich and varied stores of elo-
quence as our own. The platform and the bar the
student may lay under tribute, no less than the
pulpit. Orators of other generations he may com-
pare with profit with orators of his own. Differ-
1 British, Eloquence, 552.

102 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

ences in style will teach Mm much by very contrast.
His own defects of temperament and gift he may
remedy by careful choice of models. If he lacks
imagination, warmth, fire, let him learn to kindle
at Chatham's flame. If, on the other hand, his
feelings are sensitive and easily stirred, but his
language loose, his logic defective, and his thought
incoherent, let him turn to Erskine, the earliest
master of the modern style in speaking, whom a
competent authority recently pronounced the most
important of English orators for students of Eng-
lish law. Whatever his own native gifts or defects
may be, no speaker can afford to neglect Edmund
Burke, who alone among orators, by the power and
scope of his mind, and by the wealth of his wisdom
and suggestiveness, reminds one of Shakespeare.
" He is the only man," said Johnson, " whose com-
mon conversation corresponds with the general
fame which he has in the world. No man of sense
could meet Burke by accident under a gateway to
avoid a shower without being convinced that he
was the first man in England." The speech on
Conciliation with America, especially, less exuber-
ant and " Asiatic " than others of his speeches,
which Sir James Mackintosh regards as " the most
faultless of Mr. Burke's productions," by the logi-
cal order of its thought and the masterly grouping
of historic detail, deserves hardly less attentive

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 103

study than the Oration on the Crown. Modern
speakers must not be forgotten for the old, and in
the England of our own age Cobden will teach
the student to use his mother tongue in a man-
ner simple, straightforward, matter-of-fact : " You
know I never give any peroration to my speeches,"
he said, " when I have finished, I sit down : " ^ while
John Bright affords illustration of all varieties of
modern speech, the imaginative, the passionate, the
distinct appeal to reason, all built up on the plain-
est, homeliest idiom which the language makes
possible, and which a Quaker training could im-
part. In our own country, it is enough to mention
Webster for weight and majesty, and Wendell
Phillips for a matchless blending of simplicity and
variety, of force and grace.

Least of all can the great preachers be neglected
by any preacher who rightly values his lofty call-
ing. "I never read sermons," is the confession
that comes too often from the lips of ministers to-
day, a confession put forward with something of
conscious pride, as if the statement were enough to
prove the speaker's personal genius and original-
ity. A similar confession would hardly be made
in other callings. Great arguments at the bar,
judicial decisions of the bench, are carefully and
minutely studied by lawyers and by judges of dis-
1 Cobden, Speeches, p. 478.

104 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

tinction ; and studied, not for their substance
alone, but for manner, for the language in which
the thought is clothed. The masters of public
speech in every department have followed the ut-
terances of their predecessors and their contempo-
raries with the minutest and most patient care.
Read the lives of those preachers whose words
have sunk the deepest, who have left lasting effects
in the minds and hearts of men, and you will find
they never despised a kindred training. In preach-
ing, as in every creative art, analysis must be mas-
tered before synthesis : you must be able to take
sermon or speech apart, before you can put the
parts together with justice and effect. And this
power to analyze finds its best development and
discipline, not in our own imperfect work, but in
the finished work of the masters of speech. To
follow the processes by which great preachers
achieve their results, with close attention to each
detail, to order, form, and phrase, is to gain facil-
ity and freedom in the working of our own minds,
is to develop our own creative power.

Nor can the unconscious influence of this famil-
iarity with the great preachers be overestimated.
In the sermons of some men the note of provin-
cialism is always painfully prominent : whatever
they touch, their tone, their language, their thought,
are all of narrowest type: they remind you, it

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 105

is well said, of the conversation of those people
who have never been out of their native village :
they need to be broadened by contact with the
larger world. Now, to know the great preachers
of every age and communion is to lift the mind to
a broader as well as higher level ; it is to break
down provincial barriers, and give the vision and
freedom of the whole truth. Even the truths we
already know and love, also, gain new effect, as
these studies teach us new methods of approach,
illustration, and appeal. The very association of
the untrained, undeveloped mind, with minds of
larger grasp and poise, and perfect discipline, is it-
self an education : it makes our own thought more
vigorous and sustained in movement : it gives a
tone, a pace unto our minds : it cultivates in lan-
guage even a finer choice, a subtler sense of differ-
ence and of proportion, a delicate precision on the
one hand, and on the other a wider range.

The preacher cannot make his choice too wide
in this direction. The wealth of imagery and color
in Jeremy Taylor, " the Shakespeare of divines,"
as Emerson calls him ; the simple but majestic
rhythm of Hooker ; the point and vigor of South ;
the logic and learning of Barrow ; the naturalness
and ease of Tillotson, — all have their lessons to
teach, their unconscious infl.uence to impart. The
masters of the French pulpit will cultivate his

106 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

sense of form and order, of progress and precision
in his movement : not simply the preachers of the
court of Louis XIV., Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bos-
suet : but those of later times and of our own, La-
cordaire, Kavignan, Monsabr^, and the present
preacher of Notre Dame, D'Hulst : among Protest-
ants, from the earlier days, Saurin ; from our own
times, Colani, Babut, Decoppet, and Bersier, the
last of whom by virtue of his training in our own
country awakens larger interest, and stands nearer
us in his mode of thought.

The English pulpit of to-day by its very wealth
embarrasses the choice. No century compares with
this in the quality of English preaching at its best.
There is certainly no sign of decadence here. Each
communion has its men of light and leading, its
voices not echoes, its masters of thought and form.
The Unitarians point to the calm and philosophic
power of Martineau, the deep, spiritual insight of
Thom, the practical religious teaching of Beard.
The Independents are well represented by Princi-
pal Fairbairn, who needs no introduction here, and
by Dale, whom it would be hardly too much to call
the greatest of living preachers. Maclaren, among
the Baptists, has created a special type of exposi-
tion. The Church of England counts Liddon her
preacher to intelligence and the reason, and Knox
Little her type of fervid evangelism ; while the

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 107

Bishop of Eipoii, Carpenter, and the late Arch-
bishop of York, Magee, take highest rank as
preachers without notes, the last, perhaps the finest
type of that method of delivery which our age and
our language afford. Yet an eagle's flight above
all the rest must be placed the three great names
of Newman, Manning, and Church: Newman, so
rich in color and imagery and varied power ; Man-
ning, the keenest analyst of sin, the most direct of
preachers to the conscience ; and Church, whose
calm and thoughtful treatment of lofty themes lifts
the hearer into a purer atmosphere,

" Where, beyond these voices, there is peace."
The words in which Principal Shairp sets forth
the qualities of Newman's Parochial Sermons
might better be applied to the blended power of
these three names : " so simple and transparent,"
he writes, "yet so subtle withal; so strong, yet so
tender; the grasp of a strong man's hand, com-
bined with the trembling tenderness of a woman's
heart, expressing in a few monosyllables truth
which would have cost other men a page of philo-
sophic verbiage, laying the most gentle yet persua-
sive finger on the very core of things, reading to
men their own most secret thoughts better than they
knew them themselves." ^ If other preachers profit
us by individual qualities of outline and form, these
1 Aspects of Poetry, 381, 382.

108 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS.

surely will bring their best fruit into our lives,
when we have caught their tone and spirit through
long and close association and daily familiarity.
They must be studied as the poets are studied,
with patient care and meditation. But the effect
is worthy of the cost. For no preacher who walks
each day in such companionship, who breathes this
air indeed, can let his own style sink to the coarse
and vulgar level of the streets, or become the slave
of sensationalism or pedantry in the pulpit.

With the preachers of our own country you are
more or less familiar. They have their lessons to
teach, some of them nearer to our special work
than we can learn from preachers more remote in
time and place. But none of them, with all fair-
ness it must be added, disclose those finer qualities
which the English pulpit at its best reveals. The
sturdy manhood and spiritual suggestiveness of
Bushnell, the rush and force and rhythmic flow of
Brooks, the many-sided practical insight of Beecher,
all are worth our study. The latter, I must con-
fess, little as he can teach in form, for variety and
for homely truth to common life surpasses all. No
single sermon fails to have its special portion, re-
mark, or anecdote, or keen Interpretation, for each
special class the preacher sees before him. To
each he gives some morsel of the bread of life, and
to this adaptation in his teaching, rather than to
any brilliant gift, his power is due.

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 109

To study each preacher, then, for his special gift,
and at his best ; to supplement the defects of one
by the excellences of another ; to gather from all a
clearer idea of effective form and presentation in
the preacher's message, and frame a larger ideal of
what the man behind the words should be, — these
are the objects which the student of homiletics sets
before him, as he turns to study the masters of the
pulpit. No slavish imitation, no copying of a con-
scious model, is possible to him whose mind is open
to many types of excellence. And the higher the
masters whom he follows most, the more will he be
lifted above formal imitation to the sharing of a
kindred spirit.

The list of preachers I have named is long ; but
it is not exhaustive. I have mentioned only those,
and but a part of those even, to whom I owe a per-
sonal debt for power and inspiration, who have
been of help to me in a preacher's life. A few
hints of this character I should have prized when
my pastorate began : I make these hints to-day, in
the hope they may prove helpful to others as they
begin to preach. There is material for a lifetime's
study here : but half an hour a day given to special
work like this will soon give any man a feeling, an
instinct, for spoken style, free him from the undue
influence of written forms, and enlarge his use of
his mother tongue.

SERMONS.-

"CALLED TO BE SAINTS.

" Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the
will of God, and Sosthenes our brother,

" Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them
that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints." —
1 Corinthians i. 1, 2.

"Paul, called to be an apostle;" 'them that
are at Corinth called to be saints.' These are the
two clauses which I wish to separate from those we
have read, in order to fix your attention on them
this morning. I fear the first impression on our
minds as we put these clauses together is of con-
trast. " Called to be an apostle " ! We have a
very large idea of what that means. " Called to
be a saint " ! We have a very poor and small idea
of that, as shown in our conduct. Yet I am very
sure that the thought of the Apostle here is not of
contrast, but of closest parallelism. He sets the
two side by side as if they were on the same level.
Paul was not the man to parade, uncalled for, his
points of superiority over others. Sometimes, in
1 Reproduced from imperfect stenographer's notes.

SERMONS. Ill

this epistle notably, he is driven to recall the dis-
tinguishing marks of his apostleship, not for him-
self alone, but for the sake of the churches he has
founded, to set them on a level with the early Jew-
ish churches. This is never his choice. He loved
rather, with aU great souls, to dwell on what was
common to him and those whom he addressed. It
is a mark of littleness — shows a mind essentially
small, and a temper contemptible — to put self on
a pedestal before our fellows, and challenge their
admiration for what we have and they cannot gain,
and forget our vast distance from the divine ideal.
The highest genius is here at one with the highest
goodness. It loves to emphasize what it holds in
common with all men, — what all men may have,
and ought to have. " Called to be an apostle,"
" called to be saints " ! This is the common thought
which rings and reechoes through the epistle. Its
refrain, " We are called," blends the clauses of the
text, and binds together the hearts of the Apostle
and his hearers, and with theirs our own, bringing
to each of us, if we will realize it, the same hope,
and duty, and divine warning.

I. " Called to be saints." This is the clause on
which we wiU chiefly dwell, because we do not need
to dwell on the earlier clause. No one of us has
any question as to Paul's claim that he was " called
to be an apostle." But it seemed then, even to

112 SERMONS.

some of his own converts, to be extravagant, while
the Jewish Christians all over the world were dis-
posed to set him lower than the Twelve. This very
epistle was written largely to maintain his equal
right and dignity with his fellow apostles. But all
dispute on this point is past. The world has heard
him, and he has so far moulded the Christianity of
the Western World, — Christianity as we know it,
and as the last ten centuries have known it, — that
it is difficult for us to lift the other apostles, even
Peter, James, and John, up to the level of Paul.

So we do not need to emphasize the fact that he
was called to be an apostle, but we do need to em-
phasize the fact that everybody is called to be a
saint, and that everybody is called to be a saint.
We do not very often think of ourselves as called
to be anything, still less saints, yet this is what
Paul insists upon. Hence we must study closely
what the Apostle means, how he uses the title, and
so what force it should have for us.

1. Let us see how widely he uses the phrase. It
is not the Corinthians alone who are so addressed.
Turn to the opening of the Epistle to the liomans,
" Paul called to be an apostle, ... to all that be in
Rome . . . called to be saints." As these epistles
were written near the same time, we do not wonder
at the kindred thought. Take, then, the later epis-
tles, the three great epistles of " The Prison House

SERMONS. 113

at Rome," — Epheslans, Philippians, Colossians, —
and you find the same phrase, — "the saints which
are at Ephesus," Philippi, or Colosse. There is
indeed a noteworthy change in the form of this
address from that in the earlier epistles. There he
addresses the church, or the churches of a locality,
but here the saints : as if the more he has grown
in mind, the more he has come to see three things ;
first, that the holiness of the church is nothing more
than the holiness of the members who make it up ;
secondly, that a " saint " is what every individual
is called and meant by God to be ; and lastly, that
the highest help, the first service, he can render
any little gathering of Christians, is to keep this
truth before their minds, first, last, and all the time.
So, again and again, as he writes to different
churches, he begins with the same supreme ideal
of their lives. We hardly need say that through
each epistle runs the same line of argument. He
presses home the truth on all occasions, in all cir-
cumstances, relates it to all duties. Whenever he
writes to any company of Christians, he writes to
them as if they were saints, and calls them such.

2. Now when we turn to the character of the
people who made up these early churches, we do
not find them to be saints in the sense we give to
the word. The use of the phrase is not accounted
for by their native qualities or present attainments.
8

114 SERMONS.

Many of them had been drawn from the class of
slaves, the most corrupt in the Koman State, steeped
in vice, tainted with all manner of sins. How often
we notice, after a catalogue of crimes prevalent in
that day, that the Apostle adds, " and such were
some of you" ! This he does only to mark the con-
trast between the past and the present. Yet even
now they do not show as ideal saints. We see
them quarrelsome, divided into factions, with little
unity of spirit : their meetings were sometimes
boisterous, their sacred feasts stained with pride,
jealousy, selfishness. The Apostle is here writing
expressly to condemn a flagrant case of crime in
the very church, whose members he addresses as
" saints." We feel, as we rise from reading his
epistle, that the term would have to be taken with
a great latitude of meaning, before we could apply
it to people who make up such a gathering as this.

3. Yet, notice, in the third place, that there is
no lowering of the ideal of what a saint should be
or of what a calling is. Both words have for Paul
a profound meaning.

a. A " saint " with him is the highest possible
ideal of humanity. There are few sadder things in
the history of Christianity than the way in which
this great word, which shines out in the pages of
the New Testament, has been dwarfed and dimmed.
I turn to mediaeval history, to the language of the

SERMONS. 115

great writer who has died within two years, and
find a saint, a man who is ascetic, sour-visaged,
fasting, who goes through the world fighting, and
for himself alone. I turn to Puritanism, and read
it in the letters of Oliver Cromwell and the men
who made his staff and officers, and here is another
type of saint just as narrow-minded, with an added
touch of cant, from which the mediaeval saint was
free ; and then I open the New Testament and say.
Does the word mean such a pitiful being, instead
of the kind of man Paul conceives ? Under these
two classes of saints noble lives have been lived.
It is a fact of Christianity that multitudes of men
are better than their belief, and higher than their
professed ideal. But these later associations with
the word, mediaeval narrowness and asceticism on
the one side, Puritan eensoriousness and hardness
on the other, have sadly dwarfed and belittled its
meaning until it has become alas ! to many ears
and minds, only a cant term. Brush these aside,
put off all colored spectacles, and look into the
New Testament. There you see meet and blend,
the gentle grace, winsomeness, and charity of a
Francis Assisi, the personal purity in thought and
feeling of a Milton, the heroic manhood of a Philip
Sidney, the large-souled philanthropy, devotion, and
self-sacrifice that burned and blazed in Xavier.
That is the hind of saint that the New Testament

116 SERMONS.

holds before you, and I challenge you to find in all
the wide world of lofty thought, action, and feeling,
a broader, higher, nobler, type of man or woman
than this, Paul's " Saint."

h. "Called," again, is a great word on the lips
or from the pen of Paul. How he dwelt upon its
meaning in his own case, when forced to contend
for the sacred name of Apostle ! How exalted as a
privilege, it seemed to him, raising him to the level
of others, even though they had known Christ after
the flesh as he had not ! " Called " ! it meant that
road to Damascus, and the dazzling light which
smote him down ; it meant that before his birth
God had fashioned him and sent him into the
world for a divine purpose. And now remember,
when he says " called to be saints " of his fellow
disciples, he does not lower that thought. He be-
lieves as he utters these words and impresses them
on his hearers that every disciple in Colosse or
Corinth is just as truly called of God to be a saint
as he himself is called to be an Apostle. The call-
ings rest on the same level and basis, have the same
great object in view, and when complete they reach
the same divine end. He is no more called to be
an Apostle than the humblest Christian of his day
is called to be a saint.

4. Now, as we think of the greatness of this
ideal, as we see how much it means, I think we

SERMONS. 117

see why he has put the two clauses together here,
and why at the beginning of his epistles he delights
to insist on this great thought, that every disciple
is called to be a saint.

a. It explains to him the meaning of the sacri-
fice of Christ. That had never taken place for any
lower purpose than this : not to snatch a sinful
man away from the punishment he deserves, leav-
ing him stained with the same sin as before, not
to snatch him from hell, but to lift the soul out of
that sin and selfishness which is hell, out of those
temptations which blind his eyes and deafen his
ears to every divine call, out of the bondage and
slavery of sin into the glorious liberty of the sons
of God, — that is the purpose of the Incarnation !
Christ came, suffered,, died, rose, ascended, that
you, my brother, might be a saint, and nothing less
than that was worthy of His coming.

6. Then, again, the same thought explains the
Apostle's own call. Why was he sent out into the
world with this great message ? Why was he for-
bidden to go to his own people and sent to the ut-
termost parts of the known world to bear the mes-
sage of the cross ? Because, he now sees, they —
these despised pagans, these races lying in dark-
ness beneath the contempt of the Jew and the
Greek — are called to be saints ; because God pur-
poses to create in these distant races a new type
of man.

118 SERMONS.

c. Lastly, in this truth Paul was finding the se-
cret of the new and strange moral force which
Christianity had brought into the world. He had
seen in hundreds of his converts the power of this
truth to reform the life and build up the character.
If you would make a man something out of no-
thing, you must do more than menace him with
whips. Loftier than law is it to put within his
heart a divine spirit, and set before his eyes a
higher purpose, and make him feel that he is called
of God to be and to do something in this world.
Look at the early history of Christianity. I have
pointed out the class of people with whom it had
to deal, the dregs of the Eoman State ; but not
more wonderful was that power which centuries
before stooped in Egypt to an enslaved people, led
them through the wilderness, and lifted them into
a nation, than this moral force of the Christian
faith, which built up the base, material under its
hand into a new manhood and a new civilization.
Aye, and within two centuries compelled the admi-
ration of the haughtiest of Koman philosophers and
the most hostile of sceptics. Marcus Antoninus
writes that if it were possible for those of the Stoic
sect, to which he belonged, to reach the level of the
despised Christians, there would be hope for the
future of Stoicism. Julian the apostate, who
thought that he could sweep from the earth the

SERMONS. 119

Christianity in which he had been cradled, was
first to confess that not until paganism could reach
the moral level of Christianity was there any hope
for paganism. That early church is an eternal
comment on the power of this call, the " call to be
saints."

II. Has the power of such a call passed away
for us to-day ? Has it no message to bring to our
ears and our lives ? Do we not need to be re-
minded often of what God expects of us, of what
Christ means us to become, of the purpose of the
New Testament and the Gospel as it is sent into
our lives and into our hearts ? We, too, are
" called to be saints." The lesson needs now, as
of old, to be repeated, kept daily before us, and
enforced upon our hearts. The words are not
common enough with us. We must rescue them
from cant and disgrace, lift them above contro-
versy, release them from all fetters of narrow in-
terpretation, and take them home to our hearts.

1. In the first place, let us remember that the
call is to every Christian disciple, not to the min-
ister alone, but to laymen as well. Their call is
on the same level, from the same source, with the
same divine certainty and purpose. It used to be
the fashion to speak of the ministry as " a sacred
calling." This way of speaking has gone out of

120 SERMONS.

fashion : if because the ministry has lost its sacred-
ness, then this is a sad thing for the church and
for the race ; but if we mean that all other callings
have been brought up to something of the same
sacredness, then it is a blessing to the world. But
there still lingers in the hearts of many Christian
people the idea that the minister is called to some
level of character which it would be absurd to ex-
pect of the layman. Did you never see a Christian
who, in the case of his own character and conduct,
would allow a thousand things which he would be
ashamed to have his minister do? Do you find
any excuse for it in the light of this verse ? If I
were speaking to a congregation of ministers I
would say, With your contact with the truth of
God, you ought to have an ideal character far
above that of your neighbors, and whatever criti-
cism they pass upon you, ought only to give you a
higher idea of what Christ wants you to be. But
I should fail of my duty as a Christian preacher if I
did not say to you, that no Christian has any right
to expect from his minister a higher level of con-
duct than his own. Your moral vision sees no
ends too high for you to seek, sets no standards for
another, even for a minister, that you should not,
need not, reach. "What you feel the minister has
no right to do, that you have no right to do.
What you feel unworthy of his calling, that is un-

SERMONS. 121

worthy of yours. You are called to be a saint, he
is called to help you to be a saint. The end of
his calling is found in yours, to which his is but
the means. He is the tool to help make you a
saint, and the tool is less than the work produced.
When God gives you a vision of something bet-
ter than yourself, or something larger and more
unselfish than you are to-day, that vision is from
heaven, and is meant for your guidance. Be not
disobedient to it. The voice of your conscience
will never sound too loudly for your own life, nor
present a higher ideal than God has meant for
you.

2. So again the call is for all men, not alone
for the professing Christian. There are a great
many people in every congregation who feel and
see the ideal which a church member should reach,
and are very severe when Christians fall short of
their ideal. I make no apology for any Chris-
tian's defects, but I say to the man who sees what
the Christian should be. How did you come to see
it, my brother ? The New Testament taught you,
the Apostle's language shows you, he has painted
for you the vision of what a saint should be, and
your own heart says, that is right, and every
Christian ought to be that. But has God flooded
your heart with light merely to make you a judge
of your brother ? Is that the purpose of the

122 SERMONS.

New Testament and of the Incarnation ? No, my
brother, you are called to be a saint, np to the
highest measure you can see. God never gave
you any light which he did not mean you to use in
your own life. He has put no conscience in your
breast to make you a circuit judge over some one
else. You, all of you, are called to be saints. In
this call Father, Son, and Spirit unite. " The
Spirit and the Bride say come." The church,
the preacher, the open word, join in the appeal.
Would that I might set it ringing forever in your
hearts, to haunt your life, till it should re-make
and transform it all — " you are called to be
saints."

Remember, then, three final lessons.

1. We have all a divine purpose behind our
lives. God calls us, not we ourselves, to be saints.
He calls us by sending His Son to die for us, and
His Spirit to breathe within us. He has put us
here. He has given us this life and light, for this
end. The utmost that God can do for us, I say it
reverently, the highest thing he can do for us, is to
make us in His likeness, and that can only be done
by the fulfillment of this purpose, the developing
within our lives of the noblest saintship and the
largest likeness to His Son.

2. We have here a divine promise. How much
this means ! He who has begun a good work in

SERMONS. 123

you will not leave it unfinished. Wherever moral
failure is recorded, God is not the cause. Your
life is not straitened in Him, but in yourself.
" Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it." Reach
out to your whole heritage. You cannot ask too
much. Remember the word of the Apostle : if
He gave His Son for us, " how shall He not with
Him also freely give us all things ? " The greater
includes the less. His purpose implies the promise
of the grace you need to-day, to-morrow, and the
next day, until you trample on every sin, and ful-
fill at last your calling to salntship.

3. In the last place, the divine warning in the
verse must be noticed. If there is any failure to
attain that ideal, it is not God's but yours ; and be
assured that He can never be content with less and
that you can never be satisfied with less. You
were made to be a son of God, and though you
fill yourself with husks you can never be content
to be a swine. You were made to be saints, and
with that light flooding your life, and that ideal
filling your vision, and that call in your ears, any-
thing less than that done and realized becomes its
own condemnation, and when the soul has narrowed
itself, and forever shut out all divine life and pos-
sibility, I think no remorse can ring within our
ears more terrible than these simple words, " Called
to be saints."

124 SERMONS.

You remember the language of one of our own
poets, as he describes the soul of the malefactor
just on the borders of eternity, looking back over
his life : —

" Men think it is an awful sight

To see a soul just set adrift
On that drear voyage from whose night

The ominous shadows never lift;
But 't is more awful to behold

A helpless infant, newly born,
Whose little hands unconscious hold

The keys of darkness and of morn.

" Mine held them once ; I flung away

Those keys, that might have open set
The golden sluices of the day.

But clutch the keys of darkness yet ;
I hear the reapers singing go

Into God's harvest ; I that might
With them have chosen, here below

Grope shuddering at the gates of night.

" O glorious youth that once wast mine !
Oh high ideal ! all in vain
Ye enter at this ruined shrine

Whence worship ne'er shall rise again;
The bat and owl inhabit here.

The snake nests in the altar-stone,
The sacred vessels moulder near,
The image of the God is gone."

J. B,. Lowell, Extreme Unction.

SERMONS.
II.
THE ENIGMA OF LIFE.
" For now we see in a mirror darkly." — 1 COR. xiii. 12.

Not " darkly," but " in a riddle," as the margin
of the Kevision reads. " In an enigma " is the
exact translation. The phrase describes, not the
manner in which we look, but the thing which we
see. The darkness belongs, not to our vision alone,
but to the object at which we gaze. Thus the
clause harmonizes with the rest of the verse, with
the whole, chapter which teaches the relation in
which we stand to the great world of human life,
to our own present life, with all the problems
therein disclosed and forced upon our thought and
view.

That our vision here is imperfect and unsatisfy-
ing, all men confess : in this verse we learn the
reason for its imperfection. That reason is two-
fold:—

1. We see only the reflection, not the reality.
"In a mirror," says the Apostle, not "face to
face "; " in part," not as a whole. The object we
see in a mirror is not the object itself ; it is only

126 SERMONS.

a reflection. No object can be seen thus in its
completeness. A face or a form presents but a
single side to the mirror, and that side alone is re-
flected therein ; of the other side the mirror can-
not tell us. So in the glass of life, one side, one
part, alone is seen : the other sides, the other parts,
which together make the whole, our eyes cannot
discern.

2. Again, the figure thus partially reflected is
dim, obscure, uncertain. " In a mirror, in an
enigma." The mirrors of the old world were made
of polished metal. The art of coating glass with
quicksilver, to produce a perfect reflecting surface,
was then unknown. In any mirror the reflection
may be dimmed by mist or moisture, by the very
breath of the beholder. In the ancient mirror it
was often distorted also by inequality and refrac-
tion. So in the glass of life the objects which we
see, the very side and face which we behold, are re-
flected in broken and unequal lights. Not only do
we see in part : the very part does not correspond
wholly with the reality.

It is no wonder, then, that a vision so imperfect,
a knowledge so poor and partial, should be destined
to pass away, when once the perfect state has
come, when we see " face to face," and know as
fully as we are known. Hence the Apostle turns
from our sight and knowledge, which are but tran-

SERMONS. 127

sitory, to insist on the supremacy of that which can
never pass, — of faith and hope and love which
abide forever ; of love above all, which remains for-
ever the same, unchanged in character, though en-
larged and deepened in power as we pass from the
realm of the imperfect and shadowy into the realm
of clear and everlasting light. Thus is this verse
linked with the earlier verses of the chapter in this
noble hymn and eulogy of love.

But to-day we take this single verse, this single
phrase, as the subject of our thought. The enigma
of life I How familiar the words sound ! How
full they seem of deep pathos and suggestion !
We have all felt — who has not felt ? — the fine
fitness of the phrase. It applies to our own life
and experience, to what we know of the life of
others around us, to the life of all men, to the his-
tory of the world, with its manifold and perplex-
ing problems. He feels its meaning most who has
lived most himself and seen most of human life.
The figure is as pathetic as it is true. The enigma
of life ! We see the child puzzling over the prob-
lem or riddle he is set to solve, using all his pow-
ers to draw some meaning from the seeming confu-
sion before him. Again and again he tries, but
finds no answer. Perplexed, discouraged, in de-
spair, he may be, but he cannot give up the ques-
tion. He is sure there must be an answer : he can

128 SERMONS.

never rest content with ignorance and contradic-
tion. So, as the figure implies, we turn again and
again to the enigma of life, assured, however baf-
fled, that some answer there must be. How pa-
thetic the picture ! What truth to life it conveys !
What a testimony to the greatness of man's nature,
— ay, and to the greatness of God's revelation of
himself therein.

For notice the exactness of the Apostle's figure.
It is chosen with deliberate care. It describes just
the light in which Christianity, the grace of God
as revealed in the gospel, compels us to look at the
present life. The more closely we study the figure,
the more clearly will its fitness appear.

I. Revelation has made life an enigma, and the
gospel has deepened the enigma. The statement
at first seems startling ; but if we consider it, we
shall find it is not only a fact, but a most signifi-
cant fact, — a part of that tribute to our faith
which comes from the unconscious lips and hearts
of all who have known the gospel, or have come
within the reach and range of even its partial in-
fluence.

Look at the figure again. What is a riddle, an
enigma ? It is not a mere mystery, but a mystery
which some one has set before us by design, — a
mystery with a meaning behind it, with an answer
somewhere. It implies intention and purpose: it

SERMONS. 129

makes a disclosure necessary. It is and must be
the product of mind. It is neither fate nor chance.
It is not mere unintelligent coincidence. The child
would soon give over his effort to solve the puzzle
if he were not sure there was meaning to be found
there. He would not seek to unravel mere confu-
sion or expect to find a clue to chaos. What is
true of the child is equally true of the man. He
will not try to read the riddle of nature or of his-
tory unless he believes there is a meaning behind
it. Hence, outside of revelation and its assurance
of order and purpose, inductive science knows lit-
tle progress, and history is never studied as a com-
plete and ordered whole. I know, of course, what
Mohammedan Spain accomplished, but this is not
an exception ; for Mahomet drew from the Jewish
revelation the secret of progress, and science, in
Mohammedan Spain, however close its observation,
reached no broad and fruitful generalization. Not
science or history, however, is our direct theme
now, but rather life, of which these are a part.

Christianity compels men, then, to regard life as
an enigma. The mystery of the world was there
before : Christianity makes it a mystery with a
meaning. When the light of the gospel has dawned
on us, we are sure there must be a meaning, and
we cannot choose but seek it. This is true, not of
the believer alone, but of all who are born beneath
9

130 SERMONS.

its light. Take a community like ours: let any
calamity befall a good man, such as his care and
foresight could not have prevented, let evil follow
upon some good action, and we are all perplexed
and troubled at the result. When death invades
a home, sudden death, and takes away the young
man, the husband, the father, in the very prime of
life and usefulness, the minister knows what the
mourners will say. They cannot understand how
God, who is good and who is our Father, should
deal thus with them. They cannot understand,
and their language implies that they expect to un-
derstand, they ought to understand ; and hence
they complain as if justly disappointed because
they do not understand. Now, Christianity, the
gospel, has created this expectation. The disap-
pointment comes from the fact that life is not a
mystery simply : it is an enigma.

The significance of this fact is only realized
when we reflect that no other religion, no religion
outside of revelation, has created such a demand or
awakened and called out such an expectation. We
find it in the Old Testament, upon the lips of prophet
and psalmist and patriarch. " Thou art of purer
eyes than to behold evil," cries Habakkuk, " and
canst not look on iniquity : wherefore lookest thou
upon them that deal treacherously, and boldest thy
tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is

SERMONS. 131

more righteous than he ? and makest men as the
fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have
no ruler over them ? " ^ " Behold, these are the
ungodly, who prosper in the world," complains
Asaph ; " they increase in riches. Verily I have
cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands
in innocency." ^ " The earth is given into the
hands of the wicked," sighs Job: "he covereth
the faces of the judges thereof; if not, where
and who is he?"^ "That be far from thee,"
pleads Abraham, " to do after this manner, to slay
the righteous with the wicked : and that the right-
eous should be as the wicked, that be far from
thee : shall not the judge of all the earth do right ? " *
These are questionings of a kindred tone with ours :
it is the enigma still that presses sorely upon these
hearts.

But when we turn to the pagan world, we find
a different tone and view. The mystery is still
there, but the enigma is gone : there is not even
the hope of a clue. Neither expectation nor dis-
appointment remains. The pagan looked in Greece
and Eome, the pagan still looks in India and Ja-
pan, upon the great mystery of life, but with a
blank and unexpectant gaze, not even asking for re-
lief. No thin veil that half reveals what it hides,

1 Hab. i. 13, 14. " Psalm Ixxiii. 12, 13.

° Job ix. 24. * Genesis xviii. 25.

132 SERMONS.

no curtain whose folds are for a moment drawn
aside, invites the sad but eager eye and heart. It
is a blank wall that confronts him, with no break
and no promise of relief.

I have been reading of late a selection of epi-
grams from the Greek anthology, — brief poems
arranged according to their subjects from the wide
circle of the world's most perfect literature. The
poems upon Fate and Change, Death and Life,
are most significant. Here are all the pathos, ten-
derness, and sorrow with which our human lot and
sympathy invest such themes. We feel the fresh
grief, as we read, over the loss of friends and kin-
dred, and even of the household pets, in those
homes so far away. Here are inscriptions and epi-
taphs upon the betrothed girl, the bride, the mother
with her babe, the boy of five or seven or twelve
years old, the faithful nurse, the faithful slave, the
favorite dog, the tame partridge, the nightingale.
We feel how close akin we are to these aching
hearts, how the brotherhood of sorrow bridges all
distance of time and space and knits together the
present and the past. But one thing we miss in
all this record : one point of difference there is be-
tween these mourners and ourselves. We find no
hint here of those " obstinate questionings," those
vain attempts, forever renewed, to find some mean-
ing in the tangled maze. Disappointment is here.

SERMONS. 133

but seldom surprise; never, we may almost say,
that bitter sense of wrong whicli troubles our
hearts. They do not even blame the gods, these
sufferers of old : they view all as the play of chance
or the blind movement of unthinking fate. Life
is to them a mystery, not an enigma. They ex-
pected little of their gods, and hence they com-
plained not, and asked no reason for their broken
hopes.

It is hard for us to realize a state of mind and
heart like this : the very atmosphere is so unlike
the air we breathe. This difference Christianity
has created ; and in the very complaints, the quer-
ulous unrest, with whicli our hearts are filled, be-
liever and unbeliever alike, beneath, the stroke
of change and death, I find a noble, if uncon-
scious, tribute to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It
means much that we should expect and demand of
this the key to every problem, the answer to the
enigma of life. No other faith has ever created
such a demand or awakened such an expectation.

II. Again, Christianity alone explains the enigma
of life. Christianity alone can answer the ques-
tions it has raised.

These questionings, as we have seen, we all must
know. They haunt us and follow us despite our-
selves. They sit, like the fabled sphinx of old,
confronting every life, demanding to be met and

134 SERMONS.

answered. "We turn to philosophy, to the religion
nature teaches, to the best guesses man can make,
but find no voice and no reply. We are driven
back to Christ for the only answer and explana-
tion. With Simon Peter we still must say, after all
wanderings and vain attempts to find some other
clue, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast
the words of eternal life." ^ The answer of the
gospel, then, is the only answer to the enigma.
That answer is twofold. It tells us why the enigma
exists : it points to the future with the promise of
explanation yet to come. We cannot find relief
unless we listen to both these voices.

1. The gospel tells us why life is an enigma. It
is because this world is not a whole, complete in
itself, but only a part of a greater whole. The
part does not, it cannot, take the place of the
whole. It is not meant to satisfy in itself. It is
intended to awaken thought, desire, and expecta-
tion, that look beyond and make the future a
necessity. The broken hopes, the expectations
unfulfilled, whatever makes this life felt as in-
complete and unsatisfying, — these all are part of
God's design.

You do not expect to find the answer to a prob-
lem when only half the problem is before you.
You do not open some romance or novel, some
1 St. John vi. 68.

SERMONS. 135

story of the outer or the inner life, and think to
find the first chapter complete in itself. The first
scene, the first act, of a great drama, does not dis-
close the entire plot. The interest awakened there
must be sustained and deepened to the very end.
If it falls or fails before this point, the drama is
itself a failure. Life, it is said, is a drama, of
which the fifth act lies in another world. Life,
says the apostle, is an enigma, an unanswered rid-
dle, because we know in part alone, and not the
whole.

"It is the glory of God to conceal a thing," ^
runs the Hebrew proverb. You remember what a
change has passed over all your thought and life
as you have passed from childhood into man's
estate. What different standards, estimates, ideas,
you have to-day from those you had at eight, at
ten, at twelve years of age ! And what a dwarfing
of your life it would have been, had the childish
thought and fancy never grown larger and deeper !
The prattling words, the half -formed thought, the
imperfect reasoning, all had their place ; but when
manhood came, you put away and left behind these
childish things. The problem which it cost the
little brains such pains to answer, you understand
to-day at a single glance. You have a wider range
of knowledge on which to draw, experience and a
^ Prov. XXV. 2.

136 SERMONS.

trained intelligence for your help. What wonder,
then, since we are all children, undeveloped chil-
dren, here, with this narrow range, this limited ex-
perience, — what wonder life, itself a part, should
be to us an enigma?

2. The gospel points us toward an answer yet to
come. If it does not bring the full solution of the
problem here, it shows us where that full solution
lies. If it makes the future a necessity to our con-
science and our thought, it adds the highest as-
surance of the reality and satisfaction beyond.
" Now," says the apostle, " at this moment," more
literally, " we see through a mirror in an enigma ;
but then," with emphasis, "face to face." "Now
I know in part; but then shall I know," know
fully, as the margin adds, " even as also I was fully
known." It is not omniscience which the words
guarantee to us : that, like every other divine at-
tribute, is God's, and God's alone. But we shall
see enough to make the mystery plain. So from
some height you look down upon the winding roads
that lead through forests and valleys toward a sin-
gle centre, some populous city, it may be. The
wayfarer sees but a few rods before him ; his eye
cannot pass the nearest curve, but from your height
you see the whole.

" Thy truth gives promise of a dawn
Beneath whose light I am to see,

SERMONS. 137

When all these blinding veils are drawn,
This was the wisest path for me." ^

The Apostle is thinking also of a more direct
suggestion in the clauses before us. In place of
the reflection in the mirror, we shall then see the
reality. In place of the part, that face or side
which is turned toward the glass and so alone dis-
closed to view, we shall know the whole. Faith,
hope, and love will still be needed, and remain so
long as the creature is finite and the Creator infi-
nite ; but the vision of God and the clear sight of
all things in his light will fill the soul with un-
troubled trust, unfailing expectation, unquestion-
ing love. Such is the solution to which the gospel
points. Such the promise which the future holds.
To all our questionings this is the reply.

" O life as futile, then, as frail !

O for thy voice to soothe and bless !
What hope of answer or redress ?
Behind the veil, behind the veil." ^

Eevelation, then, creates the enigma of life. It
changes life from a confused maze, an unmeaning
mystery, into an enigma, a mystery with a mean-
ing. Christianity both deepens and enlarges the
enigma, and explains it, giving a present reason

^ S. Johnson.

^ Tennyson, In Memoriam, 56 [old editions 55], 7.

138 SERMONS.

for its existence and a promise of its solution in
the future. No other religion has accomplished or
even attempted either of these tasks. Let us learn
to prize more highly that faith which proves itseK
to us all by its unconscious influence over us, and
to those who follow its leading reveals an ever-
growing light and promise. Let us learn, then, to
use this light, and walk with greater confidence
and wait with calmer trust.

1. Let us learn to meet aright, in manly and
Christian spirit, the questions and problems of life.
We may be sure they will arise in our own expe-
rience over and over again. We cannot wholly
put them aside. When the mind only is touched
by them, we may divert our attention and seek to
rest content in simple ignorance. But the heart is
more importunate. " My heart, I cannot still it,"
sings the poet ; and, when the change and sorrow
come most closely home, the content that comes
from ignorance, from agnosticism, is scattered to
the winds. The words of eternal life alone can
satisfy then.

2. Let us beware of expecting the full solution
here. An}^ philosophy, any theory of life, which
claims to have answered all the problems of the
world, proves thereby its incompleteness, its failure
to grasp all the facts. To cut the knot is not to
loosen it, to deny or ignore the enigma is not to

SERMONS. 139

answer it. Remember the whole message of the
gospel. Look forward to its promise as well as
accept its present comfort.

3. Let us remember that the promise and an-
swer of the gospel belong to the faithful heart, and
not to the clear head alone.

" For meek Obedience, too, is Light,

And following that is finding Him." i

The closer we walk with Christ, the more we
obey him, the more his truth grows clear and all-
compelling. " Verily, verily, I say unto thee," he
said to Nicodemus, " we speak that we do know,
and testify that we have seen. ... If I have told
you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall
ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things ? " ^ We
may also reverse the inference. If we have be-
lieved and proved His testimony in earthly things
and found it true, we cannot but believe the wit-
ness that outruns our sight, of heavenly things.
He never has misled us, never has been proved to
be mistaken, in the path of present duty : shall we
not believe Him, then, when He speaks with the
same calmness and assurance of perfect knowledge
of the things unseen, of the world beyond, of the
Father's house? So shall we find grace to wait

1 J. K. Lowell, Above and Below.

2 St. John iii. 11, 12.

140 SERMONS.

with patience for the clearer light on our present
mystery, and say, with the Apostle's confidence,
" Now we see in a mirror, in an enigma, but then
face to face : now I know in part, but then shall I
know fully, even as also I was fully known."

" Between the mysteries of death and life

Thou standest, loving, guiding, — not explaining ;
We ask, and thou art silent, — yet we gaze,

And our charmed hearts forget their drear complaining !
No crushing fate, no stony destiny !
Thou Lamb that hast been slain, we rest in thee !

" Thy piercfed hand guides the mysterious wheels ;

Thy thorn-crowned brow now wears the crown of power ;
And, when the dark enigma presseth sore,

Thy patient voice saith, ' Watch with me one hour ! '
As sinks the moaning river in the sea
In silver peace, so sinks my soul in Thee ! " i

1 Mrs. H. B. Stowe.

DANTE'S VISION OF SIN AND JUDGMENT.

A STUDY OF THE INFEKNO.

The face of the great poet of Florence must
have fitly revealed his character. The death-mask
of Dante, the best known — perhaps, as late re-
searches lead us to believe, the only genuine — like-
ness of the poet, at first sight repels the beholder.
There seems a mysterious kinship between this face
and the Fates of Michael Angelo. It might serve
as a representation of Nemesis even, for every line
from brow to chin looks cold and unyielding. But
closer study of the features softens this first repul-
sion, and leaves an impression much gentler and
truer. What first seemed hardness and severity be-
comes a righteous indignation against wrong, and
beneath apparent scorn there lies a tenderness un-
utterable, a love that has learned to be most kind
because it has learned to be most just.

A kindred change comes over the man who stud-
ies faithfully the poet's masterpiece and largest
legacy to the world, the " Divina Commedia." The
hasty reader, especially if his reading is confined
to the " Inferno," is repelled by much that is gro-

142 DANTE'S VISION

tesque, unseemly, and even cruel. He sees only
partiality and caprice in the allotments of eternity,
and the poem strikes him as a sorry travesty on
justice, a miserable nightmare of vengeance, in-
spired by personal spite, by private prejudice or
partisan hate and fierceness. " The whole place of
punishment," writes Leigh Hunt, content with his
first impression, "is a reductio ad absurdum, as
ridiculous as it is melancholy ; so that one is aston-
ished how a man who thought himself so far ad-
vanced beyond his age, and who possessed such
powers of discerning the good and beautiful, could
endure to let his mind live in so foul and foolish a
region for any length of time, and there wreak and
harden the unworthiest of his passions." Such
wonder is not strange after a single reading, in a
mind like that of the essayist, sensitive rather
than profound. That the denunciation, however,
is as partial and superficial as sweeping verdicts
are wont to be, may be inferred from the life of
the poem, and its widening and deepening influ-
ence over the higher thought of men. Even among
English-speaking people, the admiration of Dante,
although slow in its growth, has almost passed into
a cultus, and men of widest difference in taste and
pursuits unite to do him homage. What is yet
more remarkable, intelligent appreciation of his
work not infrequently grows in inverse proportion

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 143

to the distance at which men stand from his own
modes and forms of faith. All this would have
been impossible, but for the intrinsic and abiding
worth of the work. Had the poem been only a
partisan pamphlet, or a personal satire, it would
have shared the fate of these, it would have been
as short-lived as they. Dante is not a Dean Swift
or a Defoe, and the " Divina Commedia " cannot
be brought down to the level of Hudibras. Dante's
feeling for righteousness, his keen sense of the
eternal distinction between right and wrong, his
belief in the inflexible certainty of justice, — these
have held fast the homage of men who have lost
sight of God and given up all faith in the world
to come. My present purpose is to emphasize
these features of the poem, and, beneath what
seems repulsive and discordant, to seek the founda-
tions of essential wisdom, justice, and love. A full
view cannot be given in the compass of this essay,
and our attention will therefore centre in the first
Cantica, the " Inferno." Dante's doctrine of sin
and judgment, as developed in the " Divina Com-
media," is our subject.

An intelligent interpretation of the poem must
begin with Dante's own words. " The subject of
this work," he writes to Can Grande, " must be
considered according to the letter first, and then ac-
cording to the allegorical meaning. . . . The sub-

144 DANTE'S VISION

ject of the whole work, then, taken literally, is the
state of souls after death, regarded as a matter of
fact. For from this and around this the action of
the whole work moves. But according to the alle-
gorical meaning, the subject is man, in so far as
by merit or demerit, in the exercise of free will, he
is exposed to the rewards or punishments of justice.
. . . The object of the whole work, as of each part,
is to bring those who live in this life out of their
state of misery, and to guide them to the state of
blessedness." Restricting his words, then, to the
" Inferno," his purpose is to reveal, beneath the
vivid lines and colors of actual facts, that inevita-
ble sequence between sin and suffering, which runs
through all worlds because it is built upon unchan-
ging righteousness. His appeal here is to the rea-
son and conscience of mankind : it needs no reve-
lation to give to it either force or clearness. Hence,
the name of God is unheard in these deeps of
gloom : hence, also, Vergil, who proves so poor a
guide along the ascent of Purgatory, and who fades
from sight as we enter even the earthly Paradise,
leads with sure steps down the dizzy steeps and
along the winding corridors of Hell. With sin as
a terrible and universal fact in human life, reason
can foresee, conscience can foretell, both the cer-
tainty and the very form of doom : but the assur-
ance and power of renewal, and the first faint out-

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 145

lines of the heavenly vision, eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, nor heart conceived, but God who has
created can alone reveal them by His Spirit. By
reason and conscience, the poet would have us
judge his work, as we pass from circle to circle of
the world below : the faith that is born of divine
grace must lead us through both the worlds above.
Let us pause with Dante, and read again the in-
scription over the sombre gates of Hell. To us as
to the poet, the meaning may be hard at first, but
the words will strike the keynote to all that fol-
lows. I give the first three lines for their solemn
cadence, and that we may not mar the symmetry
of the whole: the last six contain the important
truths we are studying : —

" Per me si va nella citta dolente ;

Per me si va nell' eterno dolore ;

Per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Ginstizia mosse '1 mio alto Fattore:

Feoemi la divina Potestate,

La somma Sapienza, e '1 primo Amore.

Dinanzi a me non far cose create,

Se non eterue, ed io eterno dnro:

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate." ^

^ Inferno, iii. 1-9.

" Through me you pass into the city of woe ;
Through me you pass into eternal pain ;
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved :
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure :
All hope abandon, ye who enter here." — Cast.
10

146 DANTE'S VISION

Righteousness is the moral cause of the world of
despair ; for giustizia is the full heir as well as the
lineal descendant of the Latin justitia. Neither
language has any other word for righteousness,
and the meaning is far broader than our " justice."
Over the great code of Eoman law runs the in-
scription, " Justice is the fixed and everlasting wiU
to give each man his due." So over the eternal
world of Dante we read, " Justice moved my lofty
Maker." Even-handed justice, as Shakespeare puts
it, righteousness that marks the eternal distinction
of right and wrong, demands that the distinction
be forever recognized in the broad world of fact,
and in the experience of every conscious child of
choice. By that moral necessity which men call a
divine decree, a possible sin, and therefore a possi-
ble hell, was involved in the very creation of finite
will : as soon as that possibility turned to terrible
fact, chain and sequence stood complete, and suf-
fering followed sin. But this first tragedy ante-
dated the fall, the creation of man, the whole
world of time : sin entered the world invisible, and
hell began with the fall of Lucifer. So long, too,
as sin endures, suffering must follow as the shadow
follows the dark substance ; but reason and con-
science by themselves discern no limit to trans-
gression, and hence see no end of pain. Revela-
tion may bring her hint or her assurance, but here

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 147

there is no appeal to revelation. Henoe, whether
we look before or after, the dark gate looms up
before us, casting its shadow of despair far beyond
the limits of time, across the two eternities, and
the inscription proves sadly true : —

"Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure :
All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

But righteousness, as we have said, is more than
simple justice. It includes all attributes of deity,
it belongs alike to every revelation of God. The
divine Power, the supreme Wisdom, and the primal
Love, are aU associated with Justice in this dark
inscription. The Trinity is clearly indicated in
Dante's words, and the teaching, therefore, is that
Father, Son, and Spirit, — Power, Wisdom, Love,
are one in their eternal righteousness, and in this
its full expression. The recognition of man's ill
desert as a universal fact, and of retribution as the
inevitable law of the moral universe, is the founda-
tion of Dante's " Purgatory " and " Paradise," no
less than of the "Inferno." His doctrine of re-
demption rests on the perfect fulfillment of the law
by Christ, which both manifested the divine grace
and condescension, and met, as man could not have
met, the demands of righteousness. But the de-
velopment of this doctrine is apart from our pres-

148 DANTE'S VISION

ent purpose, and I mention it to show the harmony
of this legend over the "Inferno," with Dante's
higher teaching.

The sternness of these majestic lines softens into
tenderness as the poet passes through the throng
of shadowy forms, and the doctrine grows concrete
in human lives. An unutterable pathos breathes
through the sighs and groans of this opening canto,
and finds its climax in the beautiful figure, bor-
rowed from Vergil, but improved by borrowing : —

" Come d' autunno si levan le foglie
L' una appresso dell' altra, infln che '1 ramo
Kende alia terra tutte le sue spoglie;
Siluileniente il mal seme d' Adamo,
Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una,
Per cenni com' augel per suo richiamo." ^

I cannot forget the many moving pictures of our
human frailty which the poets give, and espe-
cially the long procession of our human life, as it
meets us in the " Kubaiyat " of Omar Khayyam,
touched to new meaning by Vedder's wonder-work-
ing pencil : —

1 Inferno, iii. 112-117.

" Ab fall off the light autumnal leaves,
One still another following, till the bough
Strews all its honors on the earth beneath ;
E'en in like manner Adam's evil brood
Cast themselves, one by one, down from the shore
Each at a beck, as falcon at his call."

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 149

" A Moment's Halt — a momentary taste
Of Being from the Well amid the "Waste —

And Lo ! — the phantom Caravan has reached
The Nothing it set out from — oh, make haste ! "

But I can recall no other verses that equal these of
Dante in the portrayal of our sad, sinful, wander-
ing race, moving steadily onward toward the com-
mon doom of sin.

The common doom, I said : but my subject re-
minds me that the phrase is singularly inexact.
That all sin brings sorrow, and is infinitely re-
moved from the light of God, he has already taught
us. But Dante never confounded sins in the com-
mon sin. Even-handed Justice is always his guide,
and never have grades in guilt and grades in pun-
ishment received a more careful distinction than in
the " Inferno." And thus we pass to consider the
broad outline and grouping of this nether world, as
it illustrates the righteousness of God.

In the outermost circle, called Limbo, or the
border-land, are found the shades of unbaptized in-
fants and those non-believers of every age, who,
without the three theological or Christian virtues,
faith, hope, and charity, have led worthy and use-
ful lives in their generation. The whole region is
free from torment ; sorrow rather than pain is the
rule. And those who have shown peculiar excel-
lence in the world above are crowned with special

150 DANTE'S VISION

privilege by heaven. Here is the noble castle
reared by wisdom and worth, defended by the
seven virtues, as walls and bulwarks, surrounded
by the stream of eloquence, and entered by the
seven gates of knowledge. Here sorrow reaches
its lowest measure, and in their semblance these
heroes are neither grieved nor glad. Their place
and state are nobler than were known to the hap-
piest shades in the Elysian fields of Homer or of
Vergil. As Wordsworth sings in "Laodomia," —

" Calm pleasures there abide — majestic pains."

This is a world —

" whose course is equable and pure,
No fears to beat away, — no strife to heal, —
The past unsighed for, and the future sure."

Here are

" heroic arts in graver mood
Revived, with finer harmony pursued."

Pensiveness and melancholy are here, such as the
soul must feel, shut out from the highest spiritual
life ; but the delights of reason remain, and the
sages and bards are absorbed in lofty meditation
and communion. The conception of such a state
and place as Limbo bears witness to a spirit more
generous and just than we have been wont to as-
cribe to mediaeval theology.

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 151

But Limbo is not included witMn the confines
of Hell, and at the entrance of this darker realm
we feel the change in atmosphere and tone. On
the very threshold each sinful soul stands in open
confession, while Minos, the heathen judge, admin-
isters the sentence, a symbol of the heathen con-
science which thus approves the decisions of the
eternal world. Each sinner is self-condemned.
Divine justice acts upon the guilty soul in no me-
chanical and outward fashion, but from within is
the impulse that drives each onward to his merited
punishment. Nor is there one complaint from
these tortured souls that the penalty is beyond the
sin. The tragedy of Prometheus, as iEschylus has
portrayed it, conscience on the side of the sufferer
and against the judge, is impossible in Dante's
thought and vision. When Vergil speaks of him-
self, he is careful that he may not be confounded
with actual transgressors punished in deeper cir-
cles, but he breathes no murmur against the Power
that has shut him out of Paradise. Curses we
hear, loud and deep, in diverse parts of hell, curses
against self, against kindred, and against God, but
not one voice denies its ill desert, and " every mouth
is stopped," in the solemn language of the Apostle,
while the whole wretched world is proven guilty
before Grod.

This execution of justice from within outward, is

152 DANTE'S VISION

a constant feature in the teaching of Dante. In
the " Purgatorio," no outward bounds hedge in the
soul within one sphere of torment. Like Geron-
tius, in Newman's marvelous dream, the soul in
Purgatory finds solace in her suffering, until she
feels herself purged and ready to mount to another
circle. Then, as she rises of her own volition, the
mountain trembles in sympathy and exultation.
Purification, first accomplished within the soul, is
recognized and welcomed by all the universe as
soon as manifest without. Even the delay before
the process of purgation begins, the soul accepts
as just, and patiently awaits the appointed hour.
Casella, on the threshold of Purgatory, kept back
from beginning his journey upward, says : —

" No outrage has been done me.
If lie who takes both when and whom he pleases,
Has many times denied to me this passage,
For of a righteous will his own is made."

Following Aristotle, whom he reverences as il
maestro di color che sanno, Dante divides all sins
into three broad classes, — Incontinence, Bestiality,
and Malice. These sins, with all their varied shades
and forms, fall into successive and ever-deepening
circles of infamy. Some critics discover in their
order a single principle alone, the proportion of
injury which each specific sin brings upon the sin-
ner's fellow-men. As I read the poet, however,

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 153

this principle is subordinate to one far more pro-
found, the depth of moral baseness which the spe-
cific sin betrays and involves. In the subdivision
of the broad classes, this latter principle is cer-
tainly followed, for suicides and spendthrifts are
ranged below robbers and homicides. This princi-
ple also best accords with Dante's view of sin, as
something horrible and worthy of damnation in
itself, quite apart from the consequences it brings
to others. And with Dante, measure as well as
kind, of punishment are strictly proportioned to
the sin.

Incontinence, the first broad class, covers all
inordinate indulgence of passion, appetite, and
desire, whether the form be lust or gluttony, ava-
rice or prodigality, anger or sullen gloom. These
all are sins of surprise, which bring a speedy al-
though it may be only a superficial feeling of re-
vulsion, and hence do not imply of necessity a
resolute perversity of will. But Incontinence tends
downward, toward sins of darker dye. Lust dwells
hard by hate. Sensual pleasure, of whatever kind,
like the Medusa's head, which Dante makes its
symbol, blinds the eye of the intellect and hardens
the heart. Men who live in vice do not like to re-
tain God in their knowledge : they think of the
present alone, till at last they deny the spiritual
life, disbelieve in the world to come, and, like the

154 DANTE'S VISION

fool, say in the heart, There is no God. This is
the sphere of Bestialism, or besottedness, so called
by the poet, because men, by denying their Maker,
unmake His image in which they were created, and
sink to the level of the brutes, who perceive no
spiritual existence, and no life beyond the senses.
Infidels and heretics fill this circle, the latter be-
cause, by representing God as other than He has
revealed Himself, they really deny Him. But Bes-
tiality is not a final stage : it leads to still deeper
sin, to Malice. Men may forget God and deny all
immortality, and yet retain the warmest feeling for
humanity, — individuals in our own time are in-
stances in point, — but Dante felt that the natural
tendency of atheism is to the loss of human feeling.
Can we deny, on the broad scale, that this is the
result in society with its larger reading of life?
History, at least, shows no instance where a com-
munity has lost all sense of the divine Fatherhood
and yet has retained the feeling of human brother-
hood. Malice makes our neighbor's injury its end,
and is therefore a sin of deliberate purpose. This
must explain the difference in punishment between
certain sins in this category, and some that seem
like these, but are punished under incontinence.
But injury may be wrought in either of two ways,
by force or by fraud. Violence, or force, may be
used against our neighbor, ourselves, or God : and

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 155

in each of these cases its exercise may be direct,
against the person, or indirect, against some pos-
session, of the being wronged. Men who lay vio-
lent hands upon their neighbors, in person by
death or wounds, or in property by rapine, are
tyrants, murderers, and robbers. The suicide lays
violent hands upon himself, the spendthrift upon
his own property. Finally, the divine Majesty
may be violated, in His blessed Person, in Nature,
which is His child; in Art, which is His grand-
child. Hence, within this class are found impious
blasphemers, and also those who, ignoring the great
law of Genesis, " In the sweat of thy brow shalt
thou eat bread," seek to live by the gains of usury.
The second subdivision of Malice, Fraud, is the
basest of sins. It may break the simple bond of
natural confidence, or it may break beside this some
special tie of trust. Hence, in ten pits are punished
deceivers, flatterers, simoniacs, sorcerers, barterers
of justice, hypocrites, thieves, evil counselors, schis-
matics, sowers of discord, and falsifiers. Last come
the lowest sinners of all, traitors, divided into four
classes, according as they have betrayed their kin-
dred, their country, their guests, or their lords.
These lowest circles of the pit, let it be said for
the honor of humanity, are also the narrowest, and
take their names from most infamous examples of
these several crimes — Caina, Antenora, Ptolemsea,

156 DANTE'S VISION

and Judecca. Cain represents, of course, the be-
trayers of their kindred, the Trojan Antenor, be-
trayers of their country; Ptolemy the Younger
who betrayed Pompey, betrayers of friends and
guests ; while Judas is fitly singled out as the be-
trayer of his Lord. In the lowest deep of all lies
Lucifer, basest of ingrates, who, with unequalled
gifts, turned against his Creator: in each of his
three mouths hangs one of the three vilest traitors,
as Dante held them, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.
The punishment of Brutus, and even of Cassius,
may seem to us unjustly severe, but we must re-
member that to Dante the Roman Empire was
established by the direct will of God, and whoever
undermined its power was fighting against God.
If we think of the thousand petty strifes that de-
stroyed the divided cities of Italy, or contrast the
turbulence and confusion that filled the world of
that day, we shall not wonder that so large-minded
a statesman as Dante longed for the restoration of
a single government, built upon divine authority,
to punish vaulting ambition, and maintain peace
throughout the world.

Such, in rude outline, is the world of the lost, as
Dante conceived it. The consistency and power of
his conception become more impressive, the closer
we study it, and it can bear comparison with any
attempt to develop a system of sins and judgments

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 157

with which I am acquainted. M. Ortolan, profes-
sor of penal law in the faculty of Paris, has fol-
lowed the development of his special science in
literature as well as in law : he has studied with
this purpose Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Shake-
speare : " But the master of them all," he writes,
"is Dante : their master in time, for he is earlier
than they by nearly three centuries ; their master
in originality, no less, for in his conceptions vigor-
ous unity is maintained through inexhaustible va-
riety ; his poem presents itself to our study as a
complete system of punishments."

We turn now to consider the principle of adapta-
tion, of analogy, in Dante's system. A favorite
maxim of the eighteenth century declares those
punishments the best which are most analogous to
the crime. Anak)gy is the delight of the child, of
primitive races, of the multitude : its simplicity and
directness speak home to the heart : it needs no
subtle and elaborate explanations. But, on the
other hand, its charm lies in the variety of applica-
tion which it makes possible. The analogy touches
but a single point : that point may be found in the
person of the criminal, the parts of the body brought
into action, the means by which the deed was done,
the person injured, the nature of the loss inflicted,
or any of the manifold and multiform elements in
the great drama of evil. Lift these elements, al-

158 DANTE'S VISION

ready so diverse, into the realm of imagination, let
the ideal mingle with and mould the material, and
the shades and forms of reprisal become a bound-
less field for the poet, with his gifts of symbolism
and allegory and metaphor. Never was poet more
keenly alive to the breadth of his opportunity than
Dante. Never were simplicity and diversity, power
and variety, combined more skilfully than in the
" Divina Commedia."

" Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap." The whole " Inferno " is a comment and
illustration, drawn from this single text. What
fine sarcasm, at the beginning, separates the caitiff
choir of neutral souls alike from heaven and from
hell, despised by both ! How fitly their colorless
life on earth finds reward in the absolute ignominy
and chaos of the outer darkness ! We, too, would
choose any lot rather than this : —

" Misericordia e Giustizia gli sdegna ;
Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa." *

" He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap

corruption." In the sphere of Incontinence, those

who have sown the wind reap the whirlwind. The

incessant storm which sweeps the victims of lust

before its blast is type of the ungovernable tem-

1 In/emo, iii. 50, 51.

" Mercy and justice scorn them both ;
Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by."

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 159

pest of passion within the soul. Cerberus, with
three throats, emblem of unbridled appetite, a per-
sonified -belly, as Miss Rossetti aptly calls him,
bays in the ears of those who made the belly their
god. The avaricious and the prodigals, antipodes
in method, but one in the senseless waste of goods,
imprisoned ini a single circle, from opposite direc-
tions dash madly against each other with mutual
revilings. Wrathful souls, true to their nature
and their habit, smite one another not only with
hands, but also with head, and breast, and feet.
Gloomy sinners, who turned the daylight here to
darkness, for others as well as for themselves, are
plunged forever beneath the black waters of
Styx : —

" Fitti nel limo dieon : ' Tristi f ummo
Nell' aer dolce ohe dal sol s' allegra,
Portando dentro accidioso fummo;
Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra.'
Quest' inno si gorgoglian nella strozza,
Che dir nol possou con parola Integra." ^

Two centuries later than Dante, the author of

the " Imitation of Christ " sums up in stately Latin

» Inferno, vii. 121-126.

" Fixed in the slime, they say : ' Sad once were we,
In the sweet air made gladsome by the sun,
Carrying a foul and lazy mist within :
Now in these murky settlings are we sad.'
Such dolorous strain they gurgle in their throats.
But word distinct can utter none."

160 DANTE'S VISION

these vivid analogies of Dante: In quihus homo
pecca/vit, in illis gravius punietur. Ibi accediosi
ardentihus stimuUs pungentur, et gulosi ingenti
Jame ac siti cruciabuntur. Ibi luxuriosi et volup-
tatum amatores ardenti pice et fmtido sulphure
perfundentur, et sicut furiosi canes prm dolore
invidiosi ululabunt?-

Nor is the law of analogy forgotten as we pass
to graver and deeper sins, sins of the spirit as well
as of the outer life. Within the city of Dis with
its flaming walls, those who have insulted the Al-
mighty by defiance or denial feel the vengeance of
that God who is a consuming fire. Suicides, since
they have thrown their manhood away, sink from
sentient to vegetive existence, and alone of mor-
tals after the resurrection wiU. remain unclothed,
their bodies which they despised hanging to the
branches within which they are forever imprisoned.
From the region of fire we descend to the fields of
ice, where Malice finds punishment, — ice, the fit
symbol of the hardening, chilling effect upon the
heart when human affections lose their warmth, and
the soul stiffens into selfishness. Sowers of discord,
separaters of friends and kindred, pass and repass
before a demon armed with the sword, who wounds,
and rends, and cuts asunder their persons, with re-
peated strokes. Islam Dante views as a schism ;

^ De Imitatione Christi, I. xxiv. 3.

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 161

and Mahomet, as a divider, bears Hs face cleft
from chin to brow. Such are striking examples
of the varied analogies with which the poet suits
the penalty to the sin.

This even-handed justice never falters. There is
nothing to dazzle the eye, or divert the mind from
the enormity, the loathsomeness, and the folly of
the sin. Dante would have despised that respect
of persons which excuses wickedness on the ground
of friendship, kinship, or partisan and religious as-
sociation. He never let the genius of the sinner
cast a glamour over the baseness of the sin. His
comrades in political life, his friends and kindred
are measured by the same standard as the rest of
the world. His countryman, Ciacco, he puts among
the gluttons : ^ Cavalcante, father of his dear friend,
Guido, rises in the fiery vault beside his enemy,
Farinata : ^ his father's cousin, Geri del Bello, for
whom he has no word but of sympathy, is found in
the river of blood, where tyrants and their humbler
imitators take their fill of gore.^ Nor can all the
genius of his revered teacher, Brunetto Latini, save
him from the race-course of burning sand.* What
place would he have found for the heartless selfish-
ness of Goethe, or the narrow cynicism of Carlyle ?
Oh for an hour of his scourge of small cords in the

1 Inferno, vi. 52. ^ j. 52.

8 xix. 27. * XV. 30.

11

162 DANTE'S VISION

temple of our modern life, where princes are wel-
come however dissolute, and titled insolence claims
the homage of society ! His scathing words still
ring in our ears, —

" Quanti si tengon or lassu gran regi,
Che qui staranno come porci in brago,
Di se lasciando orribUi dispregi ! " ^

At the same time the excellences of those who
are punished receive their meed of fair praise.
Dante was susceptible to admiration for high at-
tainment in any sphere. He stood abashed before
heroes and sages in Limbo. The great Saladin
and even Mahomet fill his mind with awe. And
to have conversed with the worthies of the lower
world exalts him far above himself. He felt, too,
the sense of human frailty, and owned that sympa-
thy which must temper judgment in every gener-
ous soul. He does not forget that

" tears to human suffering are due;
And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
Are mourned by man, and not by man alone,
As fondly he believes." ^

The familiar story of Francesca, and the sadder

1 Inferno, viii. 49-51.

" There above
How many now hold themselves mighty kings,
Who here like swine shall wallow in the mire,
Leaving behind them horrible dispraise ! *'

* Laodomia,

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 163

tale of Ugolino, are suffused with tenderness and
pathos : of the latter, you remember, so cold a critic
as Landor could say, " The thirty lines from ^d
io senti' are unequalled by any other continuous
thirty in the whole dominions of poetry." But no
partiality could turn aside the wheel of Justice,
and human feeling, far deeper than many of his
critics are capable of sharing, cannot make him
false for a moment to his great principle. We
may call him severe and stern, but it is the sever-
ity and sternness of law, of nature, and, with all
reverence Dante would have added, of God.
Again and again he rebukes the easy-going senti-
mentalism which forgets the eternal distinction of
right and wrong, and dares to criticise with nar-
row vision the verdicts of the Omniscient. " Now
who art thou," cries the eagle of Paradise,

" that on the hench would sit
In judgment at a thousand miles away,
With the short vision of a single span ? " ^

Traces of bitterness, of personal temper, I do
not deny. The treatment of Filippo Argenti,^ of
Bocca degli Abati,^ and, above all, of Frate Al-
berigo,* are simply unpardonable. But these are
the only instances of cruelty I recall, and the tenor
of the poem is far higher and sweeter than these.

^ Paradiso, xix. 71-81, Longfellow.

= viii. 52-63. » xxxii. 97-106. * xxxiii. 148-150.

164 DANTE'S VISION

To appreciate Dante, however, we must not for-
get the age in which he lived, and his own relation
to the church and her schools at that time. The
" Divina Commedia " is not his work alone, nor the
work of his century alone ; it is the culmination of
ten Christian centuries of intense thought and feel-
ing regarding the other life and its relations to
the present. " In philosophy," says Labitte, " he
(Dante) completes St. Thomas : in history, he is
a living commentary upon Villani. Wherever you
go through the thankless valleys of the Middle
Ages, this figure, at once sombre and luminous,
appears at your side as an inevitable guide." So
Ozanam, the prince of ultramontane commenta-
tors, pronounces the " Commedia " a " Summa " of
all the philosophy of the age, and calls Dante the
St. Thomas of poetry. Whatever may be said of
Dante's orthodoxy in other particulars, and into
this moot question I will not enter, in his escha-
tology, at least, he does not depart widely from
the teaching of his church. His aim was not to
invent or amend, but to give what was already be-
lieved a larger reality and a stronger hold upon
the hearts of men, by unfolding the eternal justice
that lay beneath the subtle distinctions of the
schools. The broad outline of established doctrine
he fully accepted. The divisions and general ar-
rangement of the " Inferno," the very idea of the

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 165

" Purgatorio," the angelic hierarchies of the "Para-
dise," all are the work of a faithful Catholic.

These subjects were only too familiar to men of
his age. They delighted to dwell in imagination
upon the after life, with Its baffling but ever-stimu-
lating mysteries. Legend after legend recounted
descents to the under-world, and art vied with ro-
mance in giving color and body to eternal scenes.
Even the details of Dante's vision in many cases
have been anticipated by artists of earlier days.
In the crypt of the Cathedral at Auxerre is a
fragment that paints the triumph of Christ as mi-
nutely as Dante describes it In the " Purgatorio."
Paintings of Hell and Paradise abound in cathe-
drals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and
all forms of torture are exhausted In the sculpture
of that time. When Dante studied in Paris, he
cannot have failed to wonder at the western gate
of NStre Dame, with its varied scenes of punish-
ment and blessedness. A single French archaeolo-
gist has gathered over fifty Illustrations of the
poem from earlier art. The same coarse and ma-
terialistic forms of torture are found in painting
and In poem. It was not an age of fine sensibili-
ties. To appeal effectively to hearers and readers,
the imagery had to be made vivid and powerful.
The preachers of the age used kindred illustrations.
Eome felt her religious empire already shaken by

166 DANTE'S VISION

the profane hand of doubt, and to check this dan-
gerous foe, her clergy invoked more boldly the
fears of eternal torment. With all these materials
at hand, with the very form in some measure pre-
scribed, the world waited a poet to combine in a
symmetrical whole the scattered fragments of myth,
and legend, and allegory, cast the glow of imagi-
nation over the dullness of dogma, and call crea-
tion out of chaos.

This Dante did, and his work stands, like the
Gothic cathedral, an eternal symbol of the faith of
builder and worshippers alike. Much of what is
grotesque and hard in the poem belongs to the
times and not to the man. The vividness of de-
scription, the blaze of the very flames in the read-
er's eyes, the rivers of blood, the solid floor of ice,
those hideous nightmares of devils and fabled mon-
sters, Dante did not invent, but used with higher
purpose than his contemporaries. The consum-
mate genius must rise above his age, indeed ; he
must rise above what is unworthy and coarse in
the thought of his fellows. But even inspiration
must lower itself to the understanding of the crea-
ture, and we must not make too great demands of
the foremost souls. Shakespeare has written much
that a better era forgets, and Jonathan Edwards,
with a heart like St. John, shows how hard is the
bondage of an inhuman theology. Let Dante be

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 167

judged by the same rule, and we shall forget his
harshness, and remember the fearless boldness
which doomed popes to the same punishment with
people, the firm trust in the great truths of the
Gospel, and the faith in a divine Love large
enough to welcome every repentant sinner, what-
ever the church or the clergy might declare.

Once more, we must remember the author's in-
tense personality. In narrow minds this 'power
becomes a prejudice to warp and degrade its every
expression : in noble minds, it only deepens convic-
tion, and gives each utterance the force of reality.
What others gain by reasoning, such minds attain
by insight. Here is the difference between Dante
and Milton. Milton's paradise lay quite without
his own experience : Dante's poem is the record of
his inner history. Where Milton imagined, Dante
saw. He had passed through all these gloomy
scenes himself ; he needed no effort of imagination
to summon them before himself and then before
his readers. He spoke, like the Bedford tinker,
with the authority of the eye-witness. " He no
more doubted of that Malebolge Pool," says Car-
lyle, " that it all lay there with its gloomy circles,
its alti guai, and that he himself should see it, than
we doubt that we should see Constantinople, if we
went thither."

Each of the three Cantiche of the poem has been

168 DANTE'S VISION

linked with the period of his life to which it be-
longs, and whose character it reflects. The " In-
ferno" belongs to the years which immediately fol-
low his banishment. His heart smarted beneath
the wrong, his thoughts were full of the civic
strife. In each verse is the bloody wound, and
throughout the thunders of conflict reecho. The
"Purgatorio" was written far from home, when the
first bitterness of exile was over, while new hope
rose in his breast, as the approach of Henry VII.
quickened Ghibelline expectation. The "Para-
diso " belongs to the last years of his life, when
earthly hates were forgotten, and earthly hopes
had all withered, when heaven alone could charm
the weary soul. Then it was,

" da martiro
E da esiglio venne a questa pace."

Such is the personal element in his vision. His
life was full of hardship and thankless toil. He
knew the sorrow for ingratitude, he had proved

" come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com' e dure calle
Lo seendere e '1 salirper 1' altrui scale." ^

Do we wonder that from this world he turned
to the other for relief? that, homeless here, he
1 Paradiso, xvii. 58-60.

"How BBlt the savor is of other's bread ;
How hard the passage to descend and climb
By other's stairs I "

OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 169

sought a resting place there? or that the chief
charm of the after-life, to him, lay in the even-
handed justice which was to set right the troubled
present? There he could flee from the tyranny of
fact to the righteous rule of truth. There he
could fashion for himself a realm of perfect justice,
where every wrong should find redress, and every
right be crowned. And as he dwelt upon the
righteousness of God, these dreams he knew must
some fair day come true. Out of his dreams and
longings rose before his eyes the city of God, that
Eome where Christ is a Koman, the one eternal
city, of which every soul that loves and chooses
righteousness, however exiled here, is already a cit-
izen, although he must pass now through the pur-
gatorial flames. On the other side, lurid against
the utter darkness, loomed up the city of Dis,
walled round with fire, and peopled by souls so
deeply sunk in sin that repentance, and therefore
pardon, were no longer possible. Between these
two lay the sphere where goodness, still entangled
with evil, must struggle on the upward* path.
These realms of reality lifted his mind above the
world of sense, and in the calm contemplation of
his majestic vision he learned the lesson of patience
and self-mastery.

POEMS AND HYMNS.

POEMS AND HYMNS.

FRA ANGELICO.

I LIKE the story of that monk who knelt

In prayer devout, and, lest some thought of sin
Should mar its grace, dared not his work begin

Till in the silence of his heart he felt

Thought grow divine and earthly longings melt
Beneath God's touch, and o'er the Babel din
Heard the clear whisper of the Christ within.

What wonder, when such inspiration dwelt
In his calm bosom, that he dared not rise.

But day by day, with meek and lowly heart,
Painted upon his bended knees, and wise

Deemed not the work his own, but his the part
To seize what God revealed unto his eyes,

And bid the panel glow with holy art.

Cambridge, 29 May, 1874.

174 POEMS AND HYMNS.

SUNRISE ON MOUNT MOOSILAUKE.

Long lines of light against the trembling gray

Slow flushed with red : above, more faint and
few,

The billowy clouds : beneath, in waves of blue
That rose and fell, dark ranges stretched away
Where in broad mists the lakes and rivers lay.

Dim thro' the dawn. Outlined to clearer view,

As mount from mount his lofty head withdrew,
A hundred peaks turned patient toward the day.
O'er the steep height of Carrigain at last

Rose the red disc, and touched the mists to gold.
Kinsman's smooth slope and rifted Lafayette
Still lay in purple bathed, till higher yet

Thro' golden clouds the glorious sun uprolled.
And o'er the world the glow of daylight cast.

2 September, 1887.

POEMS AND HYMNS. 175

SUNDAY AT SEA.

Father, whose hands first framed and still uphold
Both skies and seas with all their depths con-
ceal,
In this thy temple on thy day I kneel
In lowly love and worship. Fold on fold,
Gray curtains shot with light — even as of old
In rapt Isaiah's vision fell the train
Of heavenly splendor — skirt the solemn main :
Above the blue vault hangs, with lamp of gold
Lighted each day anew. No voice I hear,
No sail the distance whitens. Silent, swift.
Our good ship forges on, the only shrine

Man's hands have reared. Yet ever, far and
near,
The murmuring waves in lowly worship lift
White hands of prayer, and mingle praise with
mine.
S. S. Alaska, 8 July, 1888.

176 POEMS AND HYMNS.

STRATFOED-ON-AVON.

Here Shakespeare's eyes first opened to the sun.

These vine-wreathed elms, green fields, and skies
of blue

Cradled his infancy. Here first he drew
Love's breath of life, and here his first songs won
Love's praise. What wonder when his course had
run

In wider circles, tried of heart but true,

Hither he came the old life to renew.
And sleep by Avon when his life was done !

So should the favored life begin and end :

Child unto man and birth with death close
bound.
An even stream through all the channel flows :
The friend of youth should be old age's friend.
The natal bells the passing knell should sound.

And on familiar scenes the eyelids close !
15 August, 1888.

POEMS AND HYMNS. 177

IN GRASMERE CHURCHYARD.

" Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her."

Lines near Tintern Abbey.

Full twoseore years the poet's form has slept

In Grasmere churchyard. Friends have long
ago

Followed him, one by one. The places know
Him still that knew him once, nor stone has kept
His name alone. The vepy turf he stept

Upon seems to remember. Murmuring low,

Fair JRothay's waters with a gentler flow
Bend round his grave. The faithful dews have

wept
Him morn and eve anew, and year by year

Have spread a richer verdure o'er the sod.
No human hands have scattered blossoms here,

And all is fresh as from the hands of God ;
Yet — mark how Nature holds her lover dear —

Twin buttercups above the grasses nod !

13 July, 1888.

178 POEMS AND HYMNS.

STAFFA AND lONA.

Behold the temple wrought in living rock
For Nature's worship ! When together sung
For joy the morning-stars, their voices rung

Through these dark aisles. This pavement, block
by block,

Was laid deep in the sunless seas to mock

The angry waves. When yonder vault was

hung.
On either side a thousand pillars sprung

To lift its arch above the tempest's shock.

Temple not made with hands ! Man, taught by
thee,
Might well have learned his lofty fanes to rear.

Touching to purpose new the lifeless stone :
Yet ages passed ere man's foot ventured near
Thy shore, while in thy maker's ear alone
Thundered the deep bass of the restless sea !

POEMS AND HYMNS. 179

STAFFA AND lONA.

Fae o'er the sea, mile after barren mile,

What green hills slope toward the northern

strand ?
One square gray tower I see : on either hand
Are broken walls. It is Columba's isle,
i-girt lona. Yonder massive pile.
Chat chapel small, those ruined cloisters, stand
i/V^here the brave saint gathered his little band,
And sent forth light to Britain. Slow defile
Before mine eyes long lines of chiefs and kings.
Brought hither by his dust to lie at rest
With abbots who of old his crozier bore.
Thus, though no more his living presence flings
Its light and splendor o'er the island blest.
His name still breathes from rock and hill
and shore.
Oban, Scotland, 22 July, 1888.

180 POEMS AND HYMNS.

FOUNTAINS ABBEY.

Soft falls the sunlight o'er the minster gray ;
The stately tower, the cloisters dim and lone,
The graves where abbots of the ages gone

Are laid. No rude hand here hath swept away

Mullion or shaft. The fingers of decay
With slow and gentle touches, one by one.
Have loosened arch and wall and crumbling
stone,

And left the ruins of an elder day !

Man's worship ceases : Nature's doth not so.
Both priest and choir are gone. But over all
Ivy and greensward live, the thrushes sing
Their matins in the yew-trees, waters flow

Beneath the cloisters, and the wild pinks swing
Their censers rich with incense from the wall !
1 August, 1888.

POEMS AND HYMNS. 181

STONEHENGE.

Where leaden skies the low horizon meet,
Thy gray stones tower above the rolling plain
In lonely grandeur. Half thy pillared fane

In ruin lies. Yet is thine altar-seat

To yonder sun-stone true, as when complete
Thy sacred circles stood, when bloody stain
Ran down thy slaughter-block, and mad amain,

The druids danced beneath thy cruel feet !

Mysterious shrine ! Thy lichened stones have kept
Their secret well ! Dane, Saxon, Koman, knew

Little as we thy meaning dark and dread !
And none shall know, till those awaken, who
Beneath thy grassy barrows long have slept.

And at the judgment earth gives up her dead !
Saxisbuky Plain, 21 August, 1888.

182 POEMS AND HYMNS.

"PEACE, BE STILL."

Dear Lord, who once upon the lake

Of stormy Galilee,
Didst from Thy weary pillow wake

To hush the wind and sea, —

Come at our prayer, and speak Thy peace
Within each troubled breast ;

Bid the loud winds of passion cease.
And waves of wild unrest.

Let that deep calm our bosoms fill.
That dwells for aye with those

Who lose their wishes in Thy will,
And in Thy love repose !

"FEED MY LAMBS."

TO A TBAOHEK OF LITTLE CHILDKEN.

When the Master long ago
Walked this weary world below.
Mothers in the throng and press
Brought their babes for Him to bless,
And from lane and dusty street
Children gathered at His feet.

POEMS AND HYMNS. 183 13

As of old the Master stands :
Still with blessings in His hands,
From green lane and dusty street
Calls the children to His feet,
Saying, as in Galilee,
" Bring the little ones to Me ! "

StiU He puts His parting test
To the hearts that love Him best :
" Simon, as thou lovest Me,
" Let these lambs thy burden be :
" Other work the world may ask, —
" Here is love's divinest task ! "

Brother, thou hast clearly heard
Through the years the Master's word !
In thine heart His voice has said.
While His hand lay on thy head,
" Unto thee this task is given,
" Lead these little feet to heaven ! "

Weary is the world and wide :

Many calls on every side

Claim our hearts and fill our hands :

Yet, methinks, the Master stands

With the old, familiar test :

" This is his who loves Me best ! "

184 POEMS AND HYMNS.

When thy day of toil is past,
And the Master comes at last,
Be it thine before His Face
Now to hear His word of gi-ace :
" In each child entrusted thee
" Thou hast loved and honored Me !
Malden, 22 October, 1891.

THE RETURN FROM THE MOUNTAIN.

Not long on Hermon's holy height
The heavenly vision fills our sight ;
We may not breathe that purer air.
Nor build our tabernacles there !

One moment, like the favored Three,
We share that blessed company,
Where Moses and Elijah shine.
Transfigured in the light divine !

The vision fades ; the splendor dies :
The saints have sought again the skies :
The homely garb the Master wore
Is bright with sudden glow no more.

POEMS AND HYMNS. 185

If with the Master we would go,
Our feet must thread the vale below,
Where dark the lonely pathways wind.
The golden glory left behind.

Where hungry souls ask One to feed,
Where wanderers cry for One to lead,
Where helpless hearts in chains are bound, —
There shall the Master stiU be found !

Nor Moses nor Elijah then

We long to see appear again :

No tabernacles by the way

We build the Master's steps to stay !

There, bending patient o'er His task.
No raiment white our eyes shall ask.
Content, while through each cloud we trace
The glory of the Master's Face !
Maldbn, 13 September, 1891.

186 POEMS AND HYMNS.

FOE THE COMMUNION SEASON.
I.

How blest Thy first disciples, Lord,
Whom Thou didst choose to walk with Thee ;
Who daily met around Thy board.
And made Thy home and family !

How blest, when throng and press were gone.
And weary day herself had fled,
From all the noisy world withdrawn.
Alone with Thee to break the bread !

Has the long day its burden brought ?
Are heavy hearts in sorrow bound ?
What sweet relief in kindly thought !
What sympathy with Thee is found !

For every care Thou hast an ear ;
Thou knowest all their changing moods :
What stirs the timid Philip's fear, —
Why thoughtful Thomas sadly broods.

Ah ! who would such a meeting miss !
What strength is here to nerve the will !
How fair a home for hearts is this !
Who would not long to find it still !

POEMS AND HYMNS. 187

And is the vision vain as sweet?
Nay, Lord ! Thy table here is spread !
And ever, where disciples meet,
Thy blessed hands still break the bread !

We see Thee not : yet when we turn,
These moments melt in memory,
And aU Our hearts within us burn.
For we have met and talked with Thee !
Mauxes, 7 January, 1890.

n.

Bbfobe us. Lord, Thy board is spread,
Thy love's unchanging token :
We share the cup, we take the bread.
Thy body bruised and broken :
And at Thy table, met with Thee,
Thy word, " In memory of Me,"
Once more to us is spoken !

No lengthening years of mist and gloom
Have power to change or bound Thee :
To-day, as in the upper room
Thy first disciples found Thee,
O let Thy Presence still our fears,
Eemove our doubts, and dry our tears,
While here we gather round Thee !

188 POEMS AND HYMNS.

We come, our hearts anew to yield

To Thee for Thy possessing :

We come, with lips but now unsealed,

A new-found love confessing :

Grant us, O Lord, Thy promised grace,

Reveal to each Thy loving Face,

And breathe on all Thy blessing !

Thou knowest all our varied need,
Our gladness and our grieving :
What joys allure, what hopes mislead,
With false lights still deceiving :
With Thee we leave our troubled past.
With Thee our future, dim and vast, —
All things from Thee receiving !

While here we hold communion sweet,
The dear, remembered faces
Of friends unseen, again we meet
In their familiar places :
For one with Thee is one with all
Who hear Thy voice and own Thy call.
Throughout the starry spaces !
Malden, 6 July, 1890.

POEMS AND HYMNS. 189

THE LAST EASTEE.

O Lord of Life, once laid in Joseph's tomb,
Around Thy grave the garden bursts in bloom, —
Thy glory breaks the world's long night of gloom !

Alleluia I Alleluia !

Thou for us all didst hang upon the tree ;
The burden of our sins was borne by Thee ;
Thy stripes have healed, Thy sorrows set us free !

Alleluia ! Alleluia !

Now all is o'er, — Thy toil. Thy grief, Thy pain ;
The vail of death by Thee is rent in twain ;
Thine earthly loss is our eternal gain !

Alleluia ! Alleluia !

Henceforth, through hours of ease and days of

care.
Help us with Thee our daily cross to bear.
Strong in Thy strength, and brave Thy cup to share !

Alleluia ! Alleluia !

When through dark vales our lonely pathway lies,
Though hearts may faint, and tears may dim our

eyes.
Thy light shall guide our footsteps to the skies !

Alleluia ! Alleluia !

190 POEMS AND HYMNS

And when, at last, our work on earth is o'er,
Lead us, where Thou hast trod the path before,
Through death to life with Thee f orevermore !

Alleluia ! Alleluia !
Malden, 2 April, 1893.